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"It's certainly a Catholic's writing," he said. His mind glanced to the person whom he had seen under the Cross; perhaps it glanced further. He sat down and began reading in extenso: "Questions for one whom it concerns. What is meant by the One Church of which the Creed speaks? Is it a generalization or a thing? Does it belong to past history or to the present time?
The deceits are too open and flagrant; the inconsistencies and contrivances too monstrous. It costs one no small effort even to admit the possibility of a Catholic's credulity: to share in his rapture and devotion is still further out of your power; and I could get from this church no other emotions but those of shame and pain.
And he who has listened to an Irish or an Italian Catholic's familiar stories of some favourite saint, may form an adequate notion of the manner in which a pious Greek could jest upon Bacchus to-day and sacrifice to Bacchus to-morrow.
The chilly wind of the afternoon had dropped, and there was scarcely a sound to be heard from the living things about the house that once more were renewing their strength. Yet over all, to the Catholic's mind at least, there lay a shadow of death, from associations with that strange anniversary that was passing, hour by hour....
And if so, why then the Catholic's claim that Christ's intention had never been wholly frustrated, but that a visible unity was to be found amongst themselves surely this was easier to believe than the Protestant theory that the Church which had been visible for fifteen centuries was not really the Church at all; but that the true Church had been invisible in spite of Christ's intention during all that period, and was now to be found only in small separated bodies scattered here and there.
Yeats, who, like all poets, is a most suggestive and a most misleading critic, has declared that modern Irish literature begins with Carleton. That is only true if we are determined to look in Irish literature for qualities that can be called Celtic if we insist that the outlook on the world shall be the Catholic's or the peasant's.
To make the Church a spiritual ally, to recognize her moral power and her far-reaching influence has always been considered good diplomacy and clear-sighted statesmanship. Catholic's Patriotism in Public Life Reconstruction is the great work of the hour; co-operation is a duty every Catholic owes to Church and country.
The keystone of the arch of Catholic certainty is the acceptance of the authority of the Church conditioned by belief in the divine character of that authority. If anything should shake the Catholic's belief in the authority of his Church and the efficacy of her sacraments then he is left strangely unsheltered. Strongly articulated as this system is, it has not been untouched by time and change.
We differ from those around us in a profound fashion, not in matters of direct doctrine, for which the modern world has largely ceased to care, but in the effects of that doctrine. The Catholic's whole conception of man and of the fundamentals of human life is a different thing from that held by those about us." H. Belloc. "To-day's boy is to-morrow's man."
This, then, I humbly conceive to be the weapon with which errors in the Roman Catholic's faith may most appropriately be assailed, for though it inflict a temporary wound upon men's self-love by questioning the powers of discrimination, leaves, at least, their moral and religious intentions unquestioned, and themselves, as a necessary consequence, unfettered by the strongest of all shackles, that of outraged principle.
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