Part I
Foreword
Every Scotsman of open mind and good will, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, will welcome the re-publication of the pamphlet From the Kirk to the Catholic Church, produced by the Reverend Bishop G. Graham fifty years ago, shortly after his ordination to the priesthood.
It is a religious autobiography of great interest, written in a simple, direct, and confidential tone, by which the young Father Graham sought to lay open before his friends the reasons and the motives and the workings of divine Providence which had brought to him the happiness of home-coming to the Church. It established for his contemporaries the strength and the sincerity of his convictions, and it provided himself with a vehicle by which to express his gratitude to Almighty God for the grace of conversion.
The conversion of a son of the manse to the ancient Catholic faith was a rare event indeed in the first decade of the century, and Henry G. Graham was not only a son of the manse, but was himself a minister and the last of a long unbroken line of Grahams who had ministered in the Kirk throughout two centuries. This is therefore a kind of apology, but it is an apology not in the debased sense of that word as we use it commonly today, but in the sublime and positive sense in which the word is used by Plato and by Cardinal Newman.
It may well be hoped that this little work will help many to see in right perspective the issues involved in the Scottish Reformation. The clear mind and deep learning of the bishop, even as a young priest, enabled him to set forth these issues with brilliant clarity, and his charity impelled him to give to others the opportunity of finding the happiness which God had given him.
All Catholics in Scotland are grateful to the Catholic Truth Society for providing us with this memorial to a great and much beloved priest and bishop.
James Black
Bishop of Paisley
February 23, 1960
Introduction
FOR nearly three hundred and fifty years Scotland has been a dry and barren land, from the Catholic point of view. By the Act of 1560, the old religion was abolished and the Kirk formally set up. Confiscation and imprisonment followed the first offense of saying or hearing Mass; banishment overtook the second, and death the third. To all intents and purposes, Catholicism was simply wiped out of the country. A mere handful of Highlanders was all that remained to represent a Church which had once reigned supreme throughout the kingdom and had the spiritual allegiance of every living soul from John o’ Groat’s to the Solway.
So things continued until quite recent days. Very few conversions took place; they could hardly be expected. Hatred of Rome was too intense, and ignorance of her history and doctrines too profound, to permit of them. Scarcely anybody thought even of inquiring into the Catholic faith. Conversion was a thing practically undreamt of, and if the idea was entertained, the inquirer was bound to remember that the step involved persecution and perhaps banishment. We require to come to the nineteenth century, and even to the second half of it, before we find any notable revival of the faith or increase in the number of Catholics. Even this can hardly be said to be owing, to any appreciable extent, to conversions, but rather to the immigration of the Catholic Irish.
Of late years, however, there has been a movement in the valley of dry bones, as in the day of the Prophet Ezechiel (Ezech. 37:7), and a noise and a shaking, and the Lord God has caused the breath of life to breathe upon them, and the bones have come together, and the sinews and the flesh, and many of the slain have risen again and stood upon their feet. It is life from the dead.
From a dead Protestantism has sprung a little army of living Catholics. There has been a steady accession of converts to the faith, and of these recruits of Rome many have come in through sheer force of conviction, brought about by prayer and study and travel and personal investigation into the Catholic system wherever it could be seen at work. From the ranks of the nobility and gentry, from among university men and professors, from the legal and medical professions, and from all the working classes, converts have been entering the fold.
There has been no deluge or downpour of conversions-perhaps it is better so, meanwhile-yet the drops have been falling in tolerably quick succession, giving hopes of a pretty heavy shower at a date not too distant, let us hope, for the readers of these lines to be refreshed by it.
We may not be impatient. To become a Catholic, we should bear in mind, is always a great venture of faith; it is especially so among a people like the Scotch, so crassly ignorant of the Catholic Church and invincibly prejudiced against her. Hence it is only with much fear and trembling, with many a haunting dread and many a wistful look behind, that converts in Scotland have hitherto ploughed their way into the fold.
But the doubters and inquirers are now plucking up courage. They have seen others going into the Kingdom of Heaven before them, and, what is stranger still, stopping there; they know how happy these have been as Catholics; they have watched them for years and years, and even until death, persevering in the faith of Rome and enjoying a peace, a comfort, and a satisfaction they never found before. Seeing this, they are emboldened themselves to begin and try to do likewise.
Now, among these, there is a class I have not mentioned yet, and that is the clergy of the Presbyterian Churches. They, too, have furnished some converts, but so far they have been very few. Theologically speaking, they are hard nuts to crack. Slow, hard-headed, cautious, unemotional, like the rest of their race; suckled and reared on Calvinism; inheriting a profound horror of Rome and all her ways; suspicious of the least tendency toward Catholicity and consequently devoid of the smallest disposition to inquire -it will at once be seen that ministers are not the kind of material out of which converts are readily to be made.
Being, besides, mostly married men with families, they have, according to the familiar saying, many weighty arguments against turning over to the Catholic Church. The father of the writer of these lines, for example, possessed ten such arguments. I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come may still be urged as an excuse by others than the man in the parable.
Considering Presbyterianism, moreover, as the acme of respectability, the symbol of honesty and manliness, and a sure guarantee of worldly prosperity and independence, its reverend officials, with equal assurance, consider Catholicism to stand for filth and degradation, for lying and dishonesty, and look upon it as the sure forerunner of temporal decadence, intellectual stagnation, and spiritual bondage. It may be good enough for the Irish, but Scotsmen are entitled to something higher.
So deeply ingrained in their minds is such a sentiment that a common argument wherewith to dissuade young persons from becoming Catholics is to reproach them with bringing disgrace upon an honorable family and dragging down their father with grey hairs in sorrow to the grave.
Parental claims and filial affection are herein set up in conflict with the voice of conscience, and the average son and daughter would require more than the average moral courage and strength of will to let conscience gain the victory. You might at least have some respect for your people, if you have none for yourself, was the rebuke addressed to an accomplished Presbyterian lady, suspected of Roman leanings and detected coming out of a Catholic church in the month of September in the city of Edinburgh in the year of grace 1909.
Tenfold greater, then, naturally, would be the shame if the family were that of a minister. Ministers themselves, therefore, as I remarked before, are not very likely converts; there is probably no class of people less happily situated for acquiring Catholic sympathies or less amenable to conviction as to the Catholic claims. Conscious though many of them are of the defects and weaknesses of their own system, they yet instinctively, and at the very outset, put Catholicism out of the question as a sheer impossibility, as hateful to God and loathsome to men. Not that way is to be sought the solution of any of their difficulties.
Their roots are firmly struck in a form of Protestantism-the Presbyterian system-deeply antagonistic to any authority except the Bible and utterly opposed to submitting to the decision of any superior court other than one’s own conscience. To tear himself up by the roots and transplant himself in other soil-a thing which every convert is, in a manner, forced to do-would be for the ministerial convert a work of rare and almost insuperable difficulty.
Human respect, intellectual pride, inherited prejudice, traditional associations, domestic and financial considerations together with an unconquerable and unreasoning dread of the supremacy of Rome-these and others that could be named are certainly motives which deter many from passing over to her embrace. When it is remembered, further, that there is no point of similarity or contact whatsoever between Catholicism and Presbyterianism, that the two systems are separated and opposed as the poles asunder, that in the public services and devotions of the Kirk there is absolutely nothing bearing the least resemblance to Catholic observance or ritual, and that, in consequence, the ministers are destitute of even that superficial inkling as to Catholic worship which Anglicans enjoy-I say when one remembers these points, one can scarcely be surprised that Catholicity has made so few conquests among them; the wonder rather is that she has reaped any at all.
Yet there have been some, and there will soon be more. As the present writer has had the happiness, by the grace of God, of becoming one of her recruits in these days, he is willing to recount in the simplest way possible the various steps that led him from the darkness of heresy to the light of the truth, in the hope that others may be encouraged to make a like inquiry, and, fearing nothing, to follow the gleam until it grows and brightens for them into the full blaze of divine truth and floods their souls with the heavenly light that streams from the Catholic faith. Then will they be able to say with the Psalmist: ln lumine tuo videbimus lumen (In your light we see the light [Ps. 36:9]).
Home
I HAD a poor chance of knowing anything about the Catholic Church, for my father was then pastor of a parish where Papists were as rare as snakes in Ireland. In the summer and autumn, indeed, one met numbers of Irishmen who had come to Scotland for the harvesting operations, but we never thought or asked about their religion. At the school I attended there were, of course, no Catholic pupils, although in the train in which we traveled to and from the town we occasionally met a priest.
My ignorance, therefore, of Catholicism could not have been more complete, and I passed from the school to the university in 1889, a common or orthodox Presbyterian -whatever that may import. Both at day-school and at Sunday-school we had certainly been taught to know the Bible well, especially the historical parts, and had learned large portions of it off by heart, as well as many of the metrical psalms and paraphrases of Scripture which are appended to the Bibles intended for Scottish consumption. Prizes were given for searching the Scriptures and for answering biblical questions and puzzles, which involved a deal of concordance-hunting.
Needless to say, we each possessed a Bible of our own, and, true to the Scotch genius and tradition, we seemed to be more familiar with the Old than with the New Testament. Small illustrated books, too, giving the chief Bible stories in popular style for children, such as Line upon Line and Little by Little, were much in use. I well remember how our youthful imagination was delighted with pictures of Samson pulling down the house upon the heads of the Philistines and Aod thrusting his dagger into fat King Eglon, and Jael hammering a nail through the brain of Sisera whilst he lay asleep. Sunday was a horribly dull day; for, taking Scotland generally, it was, to all intents and purposes, simply the Jewish sabbath.
My father did not, indeed, belong to the most straitest sect of our religion, those, I mean, who on the sabbath, assumed long faces, kept their window-blinds down, and refused to cook a hot dinner. He was rather of the Moderates who had kicked against this excessive Puritanism and had introduced organs, or kists o’ whistles, into their services. Yet were we not allowed to read any but religious books on Sunday, or to whistle, or go beyond the grounds appertaining to the manse. I need scarcely add that we did all these forbidden things from time to time.
Twice a year a fast day was observed, when some strange minister came and preached to a half-empty church, to prepare the parishioners for the Lord’s Supper on the Sunday following. There was no fasting, however, on these occasions, though there had been in former days. Young folk communicating for the first time were admitted at this season; when about sixteen years old I joined with the rest, but I cannot say that any deep impression was made upon my soul. The chief meaning of the act seemed to be that we were joining the Church for the first time -coming out as Church members, publicly demonstrating our Christian faith, and, like the Jewish boys presenting themselves at the Temple, taking upon ourselves the responsibility of keeping the law of God.
Moreover, the whole teaching about the sacrament being a sign and seal, and about receiving Christ by faith, and about feeding upon Christ Crucified and all benefits of his death, was so vague and insubstantial that my mind was in a fog regarding it; and I suspect that the great majority of the communicants were, and are, equally befogged. In the popular estimation, it was and is nothing more than a memorial feast, recalling the Last Supper and our Lord’s sufferings and death; though some of the clergy would fain exalt its meaning, and attribute to it some higher efficacy, the people generally regard their going forward to the Tables simply as a demonstration of their Church membership and as keeping in memory the death of Christ. lf they reach any deeper or higher, they will be touching on a spiritual Communion, which is the farthest extent they can go.
Terrible warnings used to be uttered against eating and drinking unworthily, and many would approach in fear and trembling lest they should be guilty of the unpardonable sin. But the fencing of the Tables in my day was a weak and paltry thing in comparison to what it used to be, when the unworthy were denounced in terms that struck terror, if not compunction, to the hardest hearts. The conditions for partaking were made so strict that whole classes of people shrank back lest they should be profaning the Lord’s Table. Jansenists and Presbyterians could here meet on common ground.
On Sunday mornings and evenings we would have family prayers and on Sunday nights, in addition, hymns and sacred music, of which my father was very fond, being a musical enthusiast and indeed a composer of hymn tunes not at all contemptible. So far as one’s private prayer is concerned, I have no distinct recollection what forms we used, beyond the Lord’s Prayer with the long ending, For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory for ever. Amen, and a childish rhyme to this effect:
This night when I lie down to sleep,
I pray to the Lord my soul to keep;
If I should die before I wake,
Take me to heaven for Jesus’ sake.
Anything like the Catholic acts of faith or hope or charity or of sorrow for sin was, of course, utterly unknown.
As for the Church, we were trained in our histories to think that the Reformation was a glorious thing for the country, to revere its heroes like John Knox and the good Regent Stewart, and to admire Elizabeth while abhorring Bloody Mary. Being the descendant of a line of ministers in direct succession for more than two hundred years, I naturally looked upon the Established Kirk as the ideal of a church and grew to conceive a wholesome contempt for all dissenting bodies, of which, however, there were none in our parish.
So far as theology was concerned, our heads were, of course, crammed with Calvinism; for years after I went to college I simply accepted it, like any other youngster, without criticism or reflection. I grew up in the Reformed faith, and under Presbyterian government and worship, without asking whether it was right or wrong and knowing and caring nothing about either Catholicism or Anglicanism.
All the doctrines of the Reformers-including such superficialities as God’s eternal decrees, election, foreordination, justification, and effectual calling-were instilled into our minds, but not in a controversial way. I must admit that we were never taught to hate Rome or Roman Catholics; indeed such a subject was never mentioned at all. We learned nothing further about our differences with the Roman creed than might be picked up from some occasional answer in the Shorter Catechism, such as that which had to be explained in our preparation for our first Communion.
Calvinistic theology is a most thorny and controversial subject, even among those who profess to accept it, and I recollect, whilst a lad, puzzling my brain and hunting through musty tomes of Scottish divines to find some reconciliation between St. Paul’s supposed doctrine of justification by faith and St. James’s doctrine of justification by works. It goes without saying that I found no reconciliation, because there was nothing to reconcile.
I was very early destined for the ministry of the Kirk and encouraged to believe that the aim of my life should be to follow my father’s footsteps and perpetuate the ministerial succession which had been in the family for so many generations. This is the only kind of apostolic succession, I may remark, which is possible in Protestant churches. To wag your head in a pulpit was considered the highest pinnacle of honor to which a Scotsman could attain. Now, I was the youngest of five sons, and as none of the others had been good enough (or bad enough) to do this wagging, my father’s hopes in this direction were fixed on me. I responded quite readily to the idea, not being aware of anything that would suit me better, and therefore, as before stated, at the age of fifteen I was bundled off to the university and safely lodged under the pious wing of a young divinity student.
College
A SCOTCH university is not a very religious place. Neither professors nor students need have any religion unless they like-there are no tests-and, as a matter of fact, a great many have none except that of nature. The only teachers who are bound to profess any creed are the professors in the faculty of divinity, who must all be ordained ministers of the Church of Scotland by law established. We were supposed to attend the college chapel on Sundays, and this many did and many did not; those belonging to the Dissenting churches frequented their own Bethels, which included the Scottish Episcopal Church.
The first four years (1889-1893) were spent in attendance at the classes in the faculty of arts, and in October of the latter year I entered the divinity hall, armed with a cautious testimonial from my parish minister (who chanced to be my father) to the effect that, so far as was known to him, there was nothing as to my character inconsistent with the profession to which I was being called.
At this point I had for companion in my lodgings a fellow-student of the same year, who was supposed, like myself, to have a call to the ministry: and it was in reality he (now himself a minister of the Kirk) that gave me a taste for anything non-Presbyterian and set me on the road which led me at last to my proper destination.
Although a Presbyterian and the son of a Presbyterian minister, he was a great lover of the Episcopal Church, having lived most of his life in England and being familiar with all the rites and ceremonies of the Anglican Church. He explained to me the mysteries of the Book of Common Prayer and the various divisions of the Christian year, of all which I was then as innocent as the babe unborn; I liked it very much.
He was a High Churchman, so far as such a being can have any real existence in the Scottish Kirk, and, anxious doubtless for the conversion of his fellow-lodger, he did his best to imbue my mind with the same sentiments. He was tolerably successful, for, being by temperament inclined that way, I took kindly to High Church ideas and soon showed my sympathy with them. In the theological college, I think we were the only two that had leanings in that direction, and in a debate in the theological society we, as mover and seconder, were able to carry by one vote the affirmative side in the question, Is Union with Rome Desirable? For arguments to back up our audacity we con- sulted the local priest, himself a distinguished convert from Anglicanism and now gone to his reward.
Our professors were a heterogeneous company, theologically speaking. Three were irreproachably orthodox and inexpressibly dull. A fourth was an iconoclastic radical who dished up the philosophy of ecclesiastical history made in Germany, whilst the professor of biblical criticism, personally devout and delightful, was so advanced as to be practically indistinguishable from a Unitarian.
This being the condition of matters in the professorial chairs, one may imagine without difficulty the effect upon those occupying the benches. We were rooted and grounded in no particular faith. There was no system in the teaching and no unity. The lectures and textbooks on the various subjects were either so vague and indefinite or so unsatisfactory and destructive that I really did not know where I stood or how I could give a coherent account of the creed we were supposed to uphold. We got scraps of different things; but no consistent or logical whole, such as is presented to the Catholic seminarist in his philosophical and theological training.
Here is the great contrast between the Catholic and Protestant preparation of young.aspirants to the sacred ministry. Prescinding even from the intrinsic error or truth of either system, one thing at least is certain: the Catholic Levite has not the least doubt what doctrines he has to believe, what is meant by them, and how they can be proved; the system (granting the foundation) is absolutely flawless and impregnable; it is a beautiful and unimprovable unity. The Protestant, on the other hand, after all his training may, and often does, find himself in intellectual and spiritual confusion; all is so changeable, undefined, and contradictory. It could not be otherwise in a college where the color of the teaching depends upon the particular school of the professor.
The same is true of the Scottish universities- indeed, we may say, of all Protestant universities everywhere. Students are sent forth indoctrinated with the views of that professor who happens to teach with the most brilliancy and persuasiveness; in the present instance it was naturally the quasi-Unitarian professor who captivated the intellects of the majority of the budding divines. In general, of course, we were all Presbyterians, and could swear, and were obliged to swear, to the confession of faith (with reservations); we confessed the great fundamentals of the Christian religion and were prepared at all costs to champion the Church of Scotland. But within these bounds there was a wide field for developing theological speculation, and even at this early stage there were among us adherents of the three distinct parties: High and Low and Broad.
Yet it never occurred to me at this period that there was anything seriously to object to in our Auld Kirk. I attended its diets of worship always on the Sundays, partook of the Lord’s Supper at intervals, and as often as possible sat under a literary and ritualistic minister, to whose sermons, full of wit, pathos, and instruction, it was a real delight to listen.
I took my share also in teaching a Sunday-school during the session and addressing meetings in mission halls and occasionally gave pulpit supply at a weekend. After the service on one of these adventures, I was tackled by a layman regarding my sermon, which, he alleged, ignored or impugned the divinity of our Lord. From this I gather that I must at this time have been superficially affected by the rationalistic teaching in the college. I know that I read a good deal of Renan and was carried away by a kind of enthusiasm for the brilliant Frenchman, whose style is so insidious and whose theories are so dangerous, especially to the susceptible and ignorant.
It was customary, too, for divinity students to plead, in parish churches during the summer vacation, for funds for the missionary society of the universities. This task I undertook once, but only once, for, on reporting that my expenses amounted to 12s. and the collection to 8s. 6d., I received no second invitation.
Student of Theology
IT was during my last year and a half as a student that I got my earliest acquaintance with, and liking for, things Catholic and Roman. I was very friendly with a fellow- student, De M., who was not generally known to be a Catholic. Besides himself there was only one other Catholic student, and that was the son of a Church of Scotland clergyman, who had renounced his living and, along with wife and family, had embraced the faith.
De M. persuaded me to go with him to the local chapel for Benediction, and the impression of that Benediction service can never be effaced. I understood, of course, nothing of it, except the sermon and the English hymns. I thought, as many outsiders think, that the priest had a little bell concealed beneath the veil, which he rung as he swung round. But the whole sight was to me supremely touching and beautiful. Bejeweled ladies kneeling side by side with swarthy toilers (a thing I never saw in any Presbyterian kirk), the many lights, the little surpliced boys, the clouds of incense, the tinkling bell, the sweet hymns, the supernatural stillness-all went home. I revisited the church on various occasions, though never for Mass, and took others with me (so contagious is the glamour of Rome) and always liked it.
The whole style of Rome, both in her discipline and her worship, began to appeal to me. 1 had a sneaking kind of reverence, moreover, for that strange, mysterious, impenetrable person, the priest, and was inclined to think that, as a spiritual functionary, he was certainly ahead of our ministers. As an instance of this, I felt instinctively that the proper man to bless the little bronze crosses which I had bought was Father A, though I could not have explained why, and the bare suggestion greatly annoyed one of my Presbyterian friends, who claimed that ministers could bless them every bit as well. The fact that Presbyterian ministers as a body reject such blessings as the rankest superstition and profess themselves incapable of doing such a thing of course made no difference to him.
These bronze crosses, I may here remark (one for each of us), I bought at a Catholic repository in Edinburgh when passing through that city, which I had to do on my way home for holidays. It was a High Church thing to wear a cross at your watch-chain, to have a silk hat with extra broad brim (you might be taken for a bishop or at least a dean), and to get your coat made with tails almost touching your ankles.
After visiting this shop, 1 would pop into the cathedral just opposite-more for the purpose, I am afraid, of looking at all the Popish objects and of buying some Catholic Truth Society pamphlets than of praying. Of the Real Presence, of course, I then and for long afterward knew absolutely nothing, yet I always experienced in a Catholic church a strange feeling of awe and mystery which I never felt in any other. The pamphlets I devoured most eagerly, and they gave the first shock to my Presbyterian complacency. Year by year I bought more of them, till latterly I had quite a large collection. I am convinced there is no more effective method of undermining a respectable Protestant’s prejudices, and dispelling his ignorance, than by getting him to take a regular course of these Catholic Truth Society pamphlets.
During the summer of 1902 I had charge of a little mission station near Edinburgh. One evening a converted Spaniard who called himself Rodriguez, along with his not-so-much converted wife, supplanted me as orators at the service by leave of the parish minister. They told of the Lord’s work in Spain, where they were laboring for the conversion of the benighted inhabitants.
Rodriguez displayed a rosary and a large altar bread, which he said the Spaniards worshiped. Personally, I was disgusted (I hated ranting Evangelicalism of every kind), and so, I discovered, were others, especially with the bold female, for whom, says St. Paul, it is a shame to speak in the church.
What possessed me to ask the favor from the man I cannot tell but I did ask for and obtained the altar bread, which was enclosed between two pieces of cardboard. For long I kept it, respectfully and carefully hidden away in a drawer. I was proud of my treasure and showed it to certain chosen friends; finally, I either consumed it or burned it. I am well pleased with what 1 did and thank God for the inspiration.
So my Catholic sympathies grew and deepened, unaccountably l admit and to a large extent unconsciously, for I was still devoted to the Auld Kirk. But there was something always drawing me closer to the Roman Church. So far, I knew nothing of her except a little externally; but I was soon to be placed in circumstances which enabled me to get a better knowledge and to see a little into the interior.
Licentiate
MY college studies (eight years) ended. I was licensed by the Presbytery in March 1897 and became by courtesy Reverend. Licensing (a kind of minor orders) entitles one to preach and visit the flock and bury people, but a licentiate may not administer the two Presbyterian sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, or perform the marriage ceremony.
An appointment of this kind fell to me in the West of Scotland at Easter, under a dear old minister, who was, I think, on the whole, the most zealous and devout Christian outside the Catholic Church that I ever met. He labored, and had done so for about fifty years, night and day, with his whole soul and body, for God and his parishioners, according to his lights, and to the Catholic poor among them he was truly charitable. Had he been a priest, I am sure he would have emulated St. John Baptist de Rossi and the Blessed Cure d’Ars.
He was intensely Evangelical, and my Popish leanings distressed him sorely. He believed and said that the Church of Rome was sound on the Atonement; her doctrine about the sacrifice of the cross pleased him much; but for the rest, he held that she was Antichrist and the Pope was the man of sin and that, broadly speaking, she fulfilled in her history the prophecies of St. Paul and St. John regarding the mystery of iniquity.
He was probably the only minister in Scotland who honestly subscribed to every jot and tittle of the confession of faith in all its literalness. Obviously, my only hope of being in agreement with such a man was either to avoid religious subjects altogether (which was not very natural) or to denounce the Broad Churchmen (which was quite natural).
At this period I bought a good deal more Catholic literature, including books, Catholic Truth Society pamphlets, and the like, but my knowledge of things Catholic was widened principally by visiting the houses of the Catholics in the parish, who were colliers. I always delighted in entering their homes, speaking with them, and picking up what information I could about their faith and practice. With true Catholic civility, they were always respectful; though they were horny-handed sons of toil, and I came to them as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. I loved to see their holy pictures, crucifixes, and rosaries, and other evidences of their faith.
The thing that struck me most of all was the distinctively religious atmosphere about their dwellings, even the poorest and most degraded. There might not be a stick of furniture in the house, nor anything that you could truthfully call by the name of table or chair; the floor might be a mass of filth, the walls swarming with vermin, and the children all but naked; yet one thing you could never miss seeing-a picture of the Sacred Heart, or of our Blessed Lady, or of the Pope, or some such emblem of religion.
There was in that house a belief in the supernatural, a devotion to a religious creed, a remembrance of the existence and the nearness of the next world, that you would look for in vain in Presbyterian houses. It was touching to see it, and it impressed me beyond measure. These people, at all events, I would say to myself, do not forget eternity. Their religion perpetually reminds them of their relation to God; it lifts them above this sordid world and teaches them to remember the supernatural. It is not of the earth, earthy; it is not a religion for one day out of seven, like the Presbyterian; but it is an everyday reality. It is not put on, but is a part of their very selves.
I could not, indeed, disguise from myself that many were living drunken lives, were continually appearing in the police courts for weekend offenses, and that the condition of their houses was an outrage on every principle of sanitation. I will confess that I was scandalized by much of what I saw, and I also had a fearful suspicion that all this was due to their religion. But, then, I found that many Protestants were every whit as bad, and that it was precisely those Catholics who never went near the chapel either for Mass or confession that were the worst. I found, moreover, other Catholics practicing their religion who were models of virtue and piety.
I listened to their religious conversation and was edified. I learned of their love of God, of their reverence for all things sacred, their self-sacrifice, their unbounded devotion to the priest and their belief in his supernatural power, and their uncompromising refusal to associate with any other form of religion.
Somehow, all this seemed as if it had the true ring about it and looked like the genuine article. I was drawn to it in some ways and repelled in others. I could not understand it all. It appeared a strange mixture of good and evil. The most natural thing, in such a case, for a Scot and a Presby- terian and a limb of the Kirk, would have been to shrink back in loathing and hatred. But-thank God!-I was not deterred by any apparent evil from considering the matter thoroughly. I always tried to take the kindliest view of it.
As was to be expected, these Catholic sympathies often found expression in conversation with my aged superior, much to his alarm. At times I felt attracted toward the Anglican Church. I read the Church Times and bought some ritualistic publications and began to think (such was my confusion of mind) that perhaps in the Anglo-Catholic branch of the Church one might be able to have all Rome’s beautiful things without her errors. I argued often on these lines, and many an argument we had on the subject.
Plainly enough the old gentleman was saddened at my giving vent to High Church ideas, and wearing the bronze cross, and kneeling at prayer when conducting service. He said people were talking. I was not surprised, considering that I had a little oratory in my room, where a huge rosary was conspicuous, and that a large photo of Leo XIII in the act of blessing adorned my sitting-room.
Our church service was of the baldest type, which harmonized well with the building itself. I felt a longing for something a trifle less tedious, but it was out of the question there, and any little ritualistic tricks on my own account were at once detected and denounced. Of course one might and did introduce, subtly, collects and prayers from the Book of Common Prayer and the Catholic Apostolic (Irvingite) Liturgy, and even from the Roman Missal (I had bought a copy of the Missal for the Laity). But all these were partly unintelligible and, where intelligible, are wholly unsuitable to a congregation at a Presbyterian service.
One night the old gentleman took me to task in his most severe manner, having heard I had nearly gone over to Rome. This I had to deny, but added that it appeared to me that, so tremendous were her claims, Rome was either the true Church of Christ or else a huge imposture. He agreed and of course declared for the latter. Another night I remember saying, I do not see how the Church of Christ could have gone wrong, as we are supposed to believe she did, for some centuries, considering the promises of our Lord that he would send the Holy Ghost to ‘lead her into all truth’ and that the gates of hell should never prevail against her. Clearly enough, I had been digesting some points of Catholic controversy.
I took the opportunity also, as often as possible, of visiting Catholic churches in Glasgow; one summer I spent some holidays in Ireland, where the sight of the faith and devotion of the people helped me on my Romeward way. I revisited the Isle of Saints once or twice afterward, whilst still a minister, and each time what I saw of the Catholic religion made me love it more and more.
It was on one of these trips that I bought a small two-penny picture of our Blessed Lady in a frame, at a mission at Caherdaniel, County Kerry. This little object of piety I thereafter always carried with me wherever I went, and I still preserve it, much damaged and blackened, as one of my greatest treasures. I have little doubt that the Mother of God rewarded this act of love toward her by obtaining for me the grace of conversion.
And yet, after all this, I took fright and drew back for a season. Whether I was afraid of a public exposure of my Popery or was terrified lest I should be doing wrong in letting myself go so far in the direction of Rome, I cannot now say for certain; but this much is certain: that on a sudden impulse one morning I made a bonfire of all my Catholic Truth Society pamphlets and other Catholic belongings, including, 1 am afraid, the picture of Leo XllI, half hoping that thus I might rid myself of the whole question.
But, as Cardinal Newman remarks, a man who has once seen a ghost can never be as though he had not seen one; and-thanks to Jesus and Mary!-the fire that burned the books could not burn the love and longing for Catholic doctrine and ritual out of my heart. I soon took courage again and in a short time gathered together as much as I had destroyed. At this point, too (1900), in the good providence of God, I obtained still better opportunities of inquiring into the Catholic system and familiarizing myself with Catholic belief and practice.
Inquiring
HAVING spent three years as assistant to the venerable clergyman aforesaid, I left at Easter 1900 to occupy a similar post in a fashionable parish in Glasgow. Here we had a fine church and a more ornamental service, with a choir costing 300 a year, which the congregation paid for and criticized. In such a city I was able, without let or hindrance, to satisfy my Catholic cravings by reading Catholic books and papers, speaking with Catholics, and visiting chapels. One little chapel in particular, belonging to the Jesuit Fathers, I used to frequent on Monday evenings at the Benediction hour.
The following summer, accompanied by a sister, I visited that truly Catholic land Belgium and saw all that was to be seen of Catholicism there. I was delighted beyond measure with the grand cathedrals and monasteries, the pictures and shrines, and all other external evidences of faith and devotion. Never shall I forget the impression made on me at seeing for the first time (what I had often read about) the poor being fed by the monks as in the ages of faith.
As we approached the gate of the Cistercian monastery at Westmalle we beheld a crowd of beggars being supplied by a lay-brother with abundant rations. This, I knew, was what one would have seen in Scotland, too, in Catholic days, when the poor were honored and cared for by the religious orders, when the land was covered with houses of charity and mercy and beneficence, and every form of human want, misery, and sickness was relieved by the devoted men and women serving their Lord in the vows of religion.
Today, I thought, these unfortunate hungry souls would be hustled into a poorhouse, to eat the bread of charity extorted by taxation. On this occasion I gained the friendship of Father Hermann Joseph, then guest-master, who assisted me by his prayers and letters during the next few critical years.
The life of those Trappist monks, a continual oblation of themselves to Almighty God in silence and seclusion, far from the madding crowd and cut off from all that the world counts dear, struck me as supremely beautiful and holy. I wondered where, within the bounds of Protestantism, one could find such an example of love to God.
Looking back on those days, I seem to have been drawn toward the Church more on sentimental and aesthetic than on doctrinal grounds. I had, indeed, studied many Catholic books and controversial writings, such as those of Newman, Faber, McLaughlin, and Di Bruno, and had read piles of pamphlets. Much of my ignorance had been enlightened and many illusions dispelled.
In particular I was now convinced that many, if not most, of the stock accusations against the Church of Rome on the historical side were wholly false. Charge after charge about popes and monasteries, persecution and immorality, I had satisfied myself, was nothing but the merest calumny. I had never before heard any but the Protestant side of these questions; now, after due investigation, I began to see that the Catholic answer was complete and crushing. As the hoary fables against Rome handed down in pious Scottish families turned out, one by one, to be nothing but the baseless fabric of the Protestant imagination and to melt away into nothingness like snow before the sun, I began to wonder if the Protestant indictment contained any scrap of truth at all.
Still, I could not say that thus far I was conversant, except superficially, with Catholic theology. Assuredly, I could not have passed an examination in the Catechism of Christian Doctrine, nor had the question, Is Rome right, after all, and am I bound to submit to her? forced itself seriously upon my conscience.
Fortunately, however, in my new sphere I was to meet with two other clergymen of the Church of Scotland who had for long-indeed for much longer than I-been observing and studying the Catholic religion and whom I found to be deeper in love with it, and more dissatisfied with Presbyterianism, than I was myself. Like-minded as we were, and pursuing the same inquiry, we naturally met together often; from the discussions I learned much that was new about Catholic history and doctrine-especially from one of the two, who had for years been making a profound and extensive study of the whole subject and had traveled in Catholic lands in the course of his researches.
Now, as he, the chief of the dramatis personae, who was already ordained (the other, like myself, was only licensed), became a Catholic about two years before I did, and later a priest, and published in two successive volumes (What happened at St. Michael’s and Why I left the Church of Scotland) the whole story of those precious days, and an account of the reasons of his own submission, I need not lengthen my narrative by covering the same ground again. Briefly, however, I may sum up the results of the reunions among us.
For some time after our association together, we-the highest of High Churchmen, of course-tried to persuade ourselves that the ministers of the Established Church were really successors of the apostles and of the pre-Reformation clergy and that there had been no break in the continuity of the Church in Scotland. This quaint notion on my part arose from mere ignorance.
Whatever the others may have thought, I certainly never imagined that ministers either claimed or possessed the power to say Mass or forgive sins. This single point of difference between the old and the new Church in Scotland would have been enough in itself to shatter all ideas of continuity in the mind of anyone that had properly studied the question.
But, as I said, I was ignorant and confused. Notwithstanding the hopeless inconsistencies and absurdities of the whole position, I still tried to think that we were really a branch of the Church Catholic and argued and even preached in that strain.
After some time our meetings and researches and pilgrimages began to produce the inevitable effect, and we found ourselves hastening on to an acceptance of almost all Roman doctrine. I say pilgrimages because we were used to pay pious visits to an old Celtic chapel, now in ruins, not far from where the third of our party held his assistant- ship. We rowed over to it in a boat and prayed there on our knees within the desolated shrine and invoked the saints to help us to know the truth and to get the strength and courage to embrace it. Many a visit also we exchanged at one another’s dwellings, and we felt, all of us, that the case was becoming desperate and demanded a settlement one way or another.
At this stage, l need hardly say, things had advanced so far that the English Church was put out of court altogether: It was a question either of the Scottish Kirk or Rome. No compromises, no half-measures were thought of. The Anglican Church might boast of having bishops and altars, fasts and festivals, grand cathedrals and a solemn liturgy, but all these did not make her more Catholic than ourselves. They were merely externals.
If the Scotch Kirk was wrong, the English Church was just as wrong. We were both separated from Rome and both equally condemned by her. The English Church and its companion, the Scottish Epis- copal Church, might arrogate and assume superiority over the Presbyterian body, and unchurch it, and claim to be the only Church of Christ in Scotland possessing valid orders, but the upsetting answer to that, of course, was Rome’s judgment upon the Episcopalians.
The fact of a jackdaw dressing itself out in peacock’s feathers does not make it a peacock. If Rome was right, the English Church was a schismatical and a heretical body no less than the Scotch, though the latter showed less anxiety about the matter, and we should not better ourselves eccle- siastically by jumping from the frying-pan into the fire. Hence the issue was, in one sense, simple and clear.
We were not misled-God be thanked!-by any Anglo-Catholic illusions or diverted out of our straight course by any specious arguments about national Catholicism. We saw quite clearly that, for a logical Scotch mind, the English Church was not, and could not be, a resting-place, but only (if anything at all) a stepping-stone across the stream: and it was better and wiser and safer, if any step was to be taken, that we should take the big jump right across, once for all. The great question was, ls it necessary to take that jump?
So far as our ordained companion was concerned, he settled that question for himself in the affirmative in the autumn of 1901. At Michaelmas we met, the three of us, by appointment, at the little ruined sanctuary of St. Michael, and there and then he made known to us his resolution to quit the Presbyterian Kirk forever and knock at the doors of the Church of Rome. We were not surprised at this decision, as it had for some time been evident that it was the only possible conclusion to which his studies and convictions could lead him.
For ourselves, neither of us was prepared to take so momentous a step, because we were not yet in conscience convinced that the change was necessary. I will not deny that I was on the point of following my friend to Rome and actually took some steps toward making my submission and led others to understand that I was going; but a great fear seized hold on me, lest perhaps I should not have given the matter enough consideration and study, lest I might be making a mistake, acting too impulsively, following a friend headlong, and taking a false step which might wreck my life. In a matter involving nothing less that one’s eternal salvation, would delay not be wiser? Would it not be better to wait and see whether further prayer and study would not lead to a different conclusion?
Whether I acted rightly or wrongly at that crisis, God alone knows, but this I know: I acted according to my conscience, formed amidst the most conflicting emotions and opposing influences. I was as yet, so I reasoned, only an unordained assistant; I had not come to the full bloom of my vocation, so to speak, supposing God had intended me to be a minister of the Kirk.
Perhaps I had not given myself a full chance of working out my salvation in the state wherein I was born. Perhaps it had been intended by Providence that I should be ordained in the Presbyterian Kirk and have a parish of my own, where I should be in supreme command, and administer the sacraments, and have the full responsibility of souls, and be kept busy, and interest myself in all the work of the parish. Perhaps then I might see matters in a different light theologically and feel quite happy.
To leave the Church of Scotland at present might really be to condemn it without knowing it in its perfection. In any case, to postpone decision till I arrived at greater certainty surely could not be wrong. Then at least I could have no regrets, and it would serve only to make the final judgment more solid and lasting.
Influenced by these considerations, I remained where I was, as did my companion in distress. We promised, however, both to him who had taken the heroic step and to each other that we should keep the question open, that we should study and pray and be faithful to God’s light and grace and not allow any worldly motives to influence our judgment for an instant.
To this determination I think I may safely say we were faithful, shutting out of view every consideration except that of our eternal salvation. Thus we parted from our friend who had resolved to leave all and follow Christ. I saw him not again until the happy day when he welcomed me on the platform of the station at Rome as an.aspirant to the priesthood, toward which he himself had already taken the first steps.
Objections
THAT I still continued to turn my affections toward Rome and gradually to lose confidence in my own position may be gathered from the remark I made about this time to a professor of Church history, who was generally supposed to be training up his students to be Catholics of the Scotch Presbyterian type.
This ritualistic gentleman, anxious to prevent a perversion to Rome, was arguing that, although the Kirk had many blots and defects and had lost much through the extreme violence of the Reformation, yet she would remedy that some day soon and would recover her bishops and sacraments and liturgy and prayers for the dead and things of that nature and that meantime the loss of all these did not destroy her identity with the pre-Reformation and the apostolic Church.
Suppose, he added, doubtless thinking this an incontrovertible analogy, suppose, for example, Mr. D., you lost an arm or a leg. Well, it would be a great pity, but you know you would still be the same Mr. D. for all that. Yes, said D., but suppose you lost your head? What then? He was silent, and little wonder, for that was precisely what the Church in Scotland had done in the sixteenth century: It had lost its head.
Another argument our High Church brethren employed to try to persuade us to stay and be faithful to the Church of Scotland was that it was cowardly to leave it simply because we thought it defective in some points; it was mean to abandon it when so much was to be done in the way of repairing the breaches and restoring old Catholic doctrines and practices. Far better surely, more noble and dutiful, to remain and take one’s share in rebuilding the shattered walls of the national Jerusalem and making her Catholic again. Illogical and inane suggestion!
Meantime what of one’s own soul? If we believed that we could not be saved in the Kirk, how on earth could we stop in it? Nothing was left but to go out and get into the right train. Were we to lose our souls by stopping in a false church on the plea of trying to restore Catholicity within it, which really meant foisting Popery on unwilling and bewildered Presbyterian congregations and causing no end of friction among the poor, stupefied, old Protestants of Scotland?
The truth is that such a proposal was based entirely on the notion that all these Catholic things, whilst very nice and desirable and devotional, were not at all necessary for salvation. The suggestion could have come only from ritualists-from men who loved ceremonial and ritual display and would have it introduced wherever the people liked it or, worse still, whether people liked it or not-but who failed to go down to the root of the matter and to see the necessity of belonging to the one true Church, of believing each and all of its doctrines, and of submitting to its discipline and government.
On us, therefore, these appeals to sentiment and loyalty made no impression whatsoever. We did not believe that one could be saved equally well in any Church, and that the only difference was a matter of millinery and incense. We could not conscientiously jeopardize our salvation on the score of Catholicizing a Presbyterian Kirk. Each one of us had an individual soul to save and to save in the way in which Almighty God willed it to be saved.
Hence the ques- tion narrowed itself down to this: Where is the true Church which Jesus Christ founded? Wherever it is, we must belong to it. If we find the Kirk is wrong, we must leave it, no matter how much we love it or with how many and deep ties we are bound to it. Our Lord’s words cannot be trifled with: If any man come to me and hate not his father and mother and wife and children and brethren and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple (Luke 14:26).
One difficulty, that might suggest itself to the mind of the reader is worth noticing. How, he may ask, could you reconcile your position with loyalty to the Church of Scotland or even with common honesty? If you were disgusted with it and had ceased to believe in some at least of its principles, how could you remain one of its ministers? I answer: Because I was a Protestant and was entitled to use my private judgment respecting Christian doctrine and principles, because I was not positively certain that the Kirk was absolutely wrong, and therefore I was not obliged to leave it, and lastly because I was only acting as did many others who rejected large portions of the creed of the Kirk and yet continued to minister in its pulpits with perfect equanimity.
For the most part, I confined myself to preach- ing those dogmas which were accepted by most orthodox Christians, so called. Nobody pretended to believe every part of the confession of faith, which was and is the doctrinal standard of the Presbyterian churches. Indeed, I had heard distinguished members of the General Assembly (the supreme legislative court of the Church) impugning some of the chief Calvinistic doctrines set forth in the confession, such as those dealing with the fatherhood of God, election, and the like.
There was all manner of different schools within the ample fold of the Establishment, beginning from the lowest Evangelical who was almost a Salvationist, continuing with the skeptical Broad Churchman, who might believe anything or nothing, and ending with the papistical High Churchman, who hated the name Protestant and went as far as he dared in the direction of Rome or at least of Canterbury. Everybody-at all events, every minister- knew this was the state of matters. There could, therefore, be no dishonesty or hypocrisy in a searcher after truth like myself (who might be classified in the third category) hanging on to the Kirk as long as he could.
Assuredly, such confusion, chaos, and contradiction in matters of religious belief must, to every Catholic, appear a perfect travesty of the Christianity founded by our divine Lord. He thinks of the tens of thousands of priests and the hundreds of millions of lay-folks in the bosom of the Catholic Church absolutely united in their religious tenets and submitting as one man to her authority in questions of faith and morals. He knows that any one of these, whether priest or layman, who should dare to disbelieve or doubt or deny a single article of defined doctrine would straightway be guilty of a grave sin against God and would be cut off as a dead branch and would be good for nothing but to be cast out and trodden under the feet of men and cast into the fire.
Such a thing as a priest presuming to pick and choose among the Church’s doctrines and yet being suffered to act and speak as a priest is a thing simply unthinkable. The reason, of course, is plain enough. It is because in the Catholic Church we have infallible authority on the one hand and supernatural faith on the other. She is the teacher sent from God, and her children, knowing her to be such, believe her teaching with divine faith.
In the Protestant bodies it is far otherwise. Their ministers and members do not believe their church is a teacher sent from God, and they acknowledge no infallible authority except the Bible, interpreted by each one’s individual judgment. Practically speaking, therefore, among them there is no such sin as a sin against faith interiorly, just as there is no such sin as a sin against authority exteriorly. There is no fixed, definite, circumscribed, cut-and-dried body of religious truths which must be believed under pain of sin. Truth is progressive, they say, and changes and advances with the march of ages.
If you object, But you must believe in the ‘confession of faith’ to which you signed your name, you receive for answer:
That is a secondary standard of belief; it is subor- dinate to the Bible; it is infallible only so far as it agrees with the Bible-and of that I am the judge, and no one else. I am not to be tied down hand and foot to a document which represents the opinions of one man in the sixteenth century. Much has happened to modify Christian belief since then, and it would be bondage and servitude of the worst type to bind my intellect to accept a creed which merely sets forth the passing notions of Calvinism in a time of religious con- fusion and revolution. I adhere to the Presbyterian system and accept in general the ‘fundamental truths’ common to all Evangelical Christians, but beyond that there is an ample field for liberty of thought, and this liberty, as I allow it to others, I claim for myself.
Within a Church with such elastic sides, anyone can see that there might be found the most divergent views and that no one could cast a stone at his neighbor and call him heretic. There could hardly be such a charge as that of dis- honesty brought against any minister, be he High or Low or Broad. Everybody, strictly speaking, was dishonest, so far as the confession was concerned, and hence it might be said that, in that case, nobody was dishonest. There was a general agreement that the document was antiquated and unbearable as a final statement of Christian doctrine, and the Kirk, as a matter of fact, has often discussed the question of how best to relieve the minds of ministers from its incubus.
All that was left to a man, then, in such a state of doubt and flux was to hold on by the Bible in default of any more satisfactory authority. As I flattered myself that I really believed in the Bible and all its parts more literally and simply and genuinely than many of my clerical brethren, I failed to see why I had not as much right as they to hang on to the Church of Scotland till better days should dawn and the clouds should be rolled away.