Part 5 (1/2)
On the day that Newman entered that fortress the triumphant cry of St.
Augustine rang in his ears, _Securus judicat orbis terrarum_; but later came the moan _Quis mihi tribuat_, and later still the stolen journey to Littlemore and that paroxysm of tears as he leaned over the lych-gate looking at the church.
Not long ago I went one Sunday evening to Westminster Cathedral. It was winter, and the streets of tall and sullen houses in that gloomy neighbourhood were darkening with fog. This fog crept slowly into the cathedral. The surpliced boy who presented an alms-dish just within the doors was stamping his feet and snuffling with cold. The leaves of tracts and pamphlets on the table blew up and chattered in the wind every time the door was thrust open.
The huge building was only half filled, perhaps hardly that. Through the fog it was not easy to see the glittering altar, and when three priests appeared before it their vestments so melted into the cloth that they were visible only when they bowed to the monstrance. The altar bell rang snappishly through this cold fog like the dinner bell of a boarding house, and in that yellow mist, which deepened with every minute, the white flames of the candles lost nearly all their starlike brightness.
There seemed to be depression and resentment in the deep voices of the choir rumbling and rolling behind the screen; there seemed to be haste, a desire to get it over, in the nasal voice of the priest praying almost squeakily at the altar.
People were continually entering the cathedral, many of them having the appearance of foreigners, many of them young men who looked like waiters: one was struck by their reverence, and also by their look of intellectual apathy.
Father Knox appeared in the pulpit, which is stationed far down the nave, having come from his work of teaching at Ware to preach to the faithful at Westminster. He looked very young, and rather apprehensive, a slight boyish figure, swaying uneasily, the large luminous eyes, of an extraordinary intensity, almost glazed with light, the full lips, so obviously meant for laughter, parted with a nervous uncertainty, a wave of thick brown hair falling across the narrow forehead with a look of tiredness, the long slender hands never still for a moment.
I will endeavour to summarise his remarkable sermon, which was delivered through the fog in a soft and throaty voice, the body of the preacher swaying monotonously backward and forward, the congregation sitting back in its little chairs and coughing inconveniently from beginning to end.
It was the strangest sermon I have listened to for many years, and all the stranger for its unimpa.s.sioned delivery. He spoke of the Fall of Man as a certainty[8]. He spoke continually of an offended G.o.d. Between this offended G.o.d and His creature Man sin had dug an impa.s.sable chasm.
But Christ had thrown a bridge, from heaven's side of that chasm, over the dreadful gulf. This is why Christ described Himself as the Way. He is the Way over that chasm, and there is no other.
[Footnote 8: ”It is a very singular and important fact that, from the appearance in Genesis of the account of the creation and sin and punishment of the first pair, not the faintest explicit allusion to it is subsequently found anywhere in literature until about the time of Christ... . Jesus Himself never once alludes to Adam, or to any part of the story of Eden.”--ALGER.]
But Christ also described Himself as a door. What is the definition of a door? It is not enough to say that a door is a thing for letting people in and letting people out. It is a thing for letting _some_ people in, and for shutting other people out.
To whom did Christ entrust the key of this door? To St. Peter--to the disciple who had denied Him thrice. What a marvellous choice! Would you have thought of doing that? Should I have thought of doing that? Would any theologian have invented such an idea? But that is what Christ did.
And ever since, St. Peter and his successors have held the keys of Heaven and h.e.l.l, with power to loose and bind. What? you exclaim, were the Keys of Heaven and h.e.l.l entrusted to even those Popes who lived sinful lives and brought disgrace on the name of religion? Yes. To them and to no others in their day. Whatever their lives may have been at other moments, when they were loosing and binding they were acting for St. Peter, who stood behind them, and behind St. Peter stood Jesus Christ.
Such in brief was the sermon delivered that Sunday evening to the faithful in Westminster Cathedral by one of the wittiest men now living and one of the cleverest young men who ever came down from Oxford with the a.s.surance of a great career before them.
How is it that he has come to such a pa.s.s?
I feel that he is in part whistling to keep up his courage, but in chief forcing himself to utter an extreme of traditional belief in order to destroy the last vestige in his mind of a free intellectual existence.
Auto-suggestion has a power of which we only begin to know the first movements.
The man who has said that he would not choose as the battleground of the Christian religion either ”the credibility of Judges or the edibility of Jonah,” the man who is blest with an unusual sense of humour and intellectual subtlety of a rare order, is here found preaching a theology which is fast being rejected by the students of Barcelona and is being questioned even by the peasants of Ireland. What does it mean?
Is it possible to understand such a perversion of mind?
His intellectual position, as he states it, is a simple one--for the present.
He asks us, Is Truth something which we are ordered to keep, or something which we are ordered to find?
Is our business holding the fort? Or is it looking for the Pole?
The traditionalist can say, ”Here is the Truth, written down for you and me in black and white; I mean to keep it, and defend it from attack; will you rally round it? Will you help me?”
He shows you the modernist wandering in the wilderness of speculative theology looking for the Truth which the traditionalist, safe, warm, and secure of eternal life, keeps whole and undefiled in his fortress.
It is like a fairy tale.