Part 5 (2/2)
How simple it sounds! But when Father Knox looks in the gla.s.s does he not see its staring fallacy?
Did he keep the Truth of his boyhood--the Truth of his father's church?
Did he not go outside the fortress of Evangelicalism and seek for Truth in the fortress of Anglo-Catholicism? And here again, did he not break faith, and once more seek Truth outside its walls? If Truth is not something to be found, how is it that he is not still in the house of his fathers?
Does he fail to see that this argument not merely explains but vindicates the rejection of Christ by the Jews? They had their tradition, a tradition of immemorial sanct.i.ty, perhaps the n.o.blest tradition of any people in the world.
Does he not also see that it destroys the _raison d'etre_ of the Christian missionary, and would reduce the whole world to a state of what Nietzsche called Chinaism and profound mediocrity?
Every religion in history, from the wors.h.i.+p of Osiris, Serapis, and Mithras to the loathsome rites practised in the darkness of African forests, has been handed down as unquestionable truth commanding the loyalty of its disciples. What logic, what magic of holiness, could destroy a false religion if tradition is sacrosanct and all innovation of the devil?
The intellectual duty of a Christian, Father Knox lays it down, is ”to resist the natural tendencies of his reason, and believe what he is told, just as he is expected to do what he is told, not what comes natural to him.”
Such a proposition provokes a smile, but in the case of this man it provokes a feeling of grief. I cannot bring myself to believe that he has yet found rest for his soul, or that he can so easily strangle the free existence of his mind. His present position fills me with pity, his future with apprehension.
He is one of the modestest of men, almost shrinking in his diffidence and nervous self-distrust, an under-graduate who is mildly excited about an ingenious line of reasoning, a wit who loves to play tricks with the subtlety of a curiously agile brain, a casuist who sees quickly the c.h.i.n.ks in the armour of an adversary. But with all his boyishness, and charm, and humility, and engaging cleverness, there is a light in his eyes too feverish for peace of mind. I cannot prevent myself from thinking that his secession, which was something of a comedy to his friends, may prove something of a tragedy to him.
He seems to me one of the most pathetic examples I ever encountered of the ruin wrought by Fear. I think that the one motive of his life has been a constant terror of finding himself in the wrong. The door, which for Dr. Inge has no key, because it has no lock, is to Ronald Knox a door of terror which opens only to a single key--and a door which as surely shuts out from eternal life the soul that is wrong as the soul that is wicked. He must have certainty. He dare not contemplate the prospect of awaking one day to find his religious life ”a ghastly mistake.”
At the cross roads there was for him no Good Shepherd, only the dark shadow of an offended G.o.d. He ran for safety, for certainty. Has he found them?
It may be that the last of his doubts will leave him, that the iron discipline of the Roman Church and the auto-suggestion of his own earnest pa.s.sion for inward peace, may deliver him from all fear, all uneasiness, and that one day, forsaking the challenging sermon and the too violent a.s.sertion of the Catholic faith, he may find himself sitting down in great peace of mind and with a golden mellowness of spirit to write an _Apologia pro Vita Sua_ more genial and less shallow than _A Spiritual aeneid_.
Such a book from his pen would lack, I think, the fine sweetness of Newman's great work, but it might excel all other books of religious autobiography in charming wit and endearing good humour. The Church of Rome has caught in him neither a Newman nor a Manning. It has caught either a Sydney Smith or a Tartar.
He has too much humour to be a bigot, and too much humanity to be satisfied with a cell. For the moment he seems to embrace Original Sin, to fling his arms round the idea of an offended G.o.d, and to shout at the top of his voice that there is no violence to his reason and to his common sense which he cannot contemplate and most gladly accomplish, in the name of Tradition; but the pulses cool, the white heat of enthusiasm evaporates, fears take wing as we grow older, and whispers from the outer world of advancing and conquering men find their way into the oldest blockhouse ever built against the movements of thought.
”Science,” says Dr. Inge, ”has been the slowly advancing Nemesis which has overtaken a barbarised and paganised Christianity. She has come with a winnowing fan in her hand, and she will not stop till she has thoroughly purged her floor.”
I am sure Ronald Knox was never meant to shut his eyes and stop his ears against this movement of truth, and I am almost sure that he will presently find it impossible not to look, and not to listen.
And then ... what then?
DR. L.P. JACKS
JACKS, LAWRENCE PEARSALL, Princ.i.p.al of Manchester College, Oxford, since 1915; Professor of Philosophy, Manchester College, Oxford, since 1903; Editor of the _Hibbert Journal_ since its foundation, 1902; b.
Nottingham, 1860; m. 1889 Olive Cecilia, d. of late Rev. Stopford Brooke. Educ.: University School, Nottingham; University of London (M.A., 1886); Manchester College; Gottingen; Harvard, U.S.A.; Hon. M.A., Oxford; Hon. L.L.D., Glasgow; Hon. D.D. Harvard; entered Ministry as a.s.sistant to Rev. Stopford Brooke, in Bedford Chapel, 1887; subsequently at Renshaw Street Chapel, Liverpool, and the Church of the Messiah, Birmingham.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Dr. L.P. Jacks]
CHAPTER IV
DR. L.P. JACKS
_As an excellent amateur huntsman once said to me, ”If you must cast, lead the hounds into the belief that they are doing it themselves_.”--JOHN ANDREW DOYLE.
One of the great ladies of Oxford was telling me the other day that she remembers a time when friends of hers refused, even with averted eyes and a bottle of smelling salts at the nose, to go down the road where Mansfield College had presumed to raise its red walls of Nonconformity.
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