|
THE title of this chapter is melodramatic; it is exaggerated; and, as a
summary description of the life of the Church during the next forty
years, too inexact, of course, to be true. But the Virgilian line
summarises fairly correctly the impression which the reader usually
retains from his study of the period; from one, quite understandable,
point of view, it may even be said to describe the period very well.
The history of the Church, if history indeed describes the flowing
stream of time, bears no relation to that tapestry of the ' full fed
river winding slow mid herds upon an endless plain"; it is rather, and
it must ever be, a stream in flood, driving over a hard bed and through
a resisting channel, where the rapids are frequent, and where, once in
a while, there comes a sudden gigantic alteration of the level over
which the waters pour in a very Niagara. It is so, and it must be so,
because the Church is not just humanity socially ordered for ends that
are natural, and to be attained very largely by a harmony of action
that need be no more than external. The Church is a divine creation,
imposing an order whose ends are supernatural, where the needed harmony
is utterly unattainable except by action that is rooted in personal
conviction, and based on assents that are, of their nature, internal.
Herein lies all the promise of the Church to labouring and expectant
humanity; and herein lies the whole tragedy of its long history. For
assents such as these lie wholly within the uncontrollable power of the
individual; the Church, whose good fortune largely depends on these
internal assents, cannot compel them. The Church continues through
time, and must face its task, whatever the generosity, or the rarity,
at any given period of these needed internal assents to its teaching
and direction; and in all ages it never ceases, and can never cease, to
demand such assents, and to demand that all else be subordinated to
them. Temporal rulers, kings and princes -- the State -- are no doubt
bound, in their function, by the same moral law that binds the
spiritual ruler; but the spiritual ruler does not only need to keep the
moral law, it is the primary function of his office continually to
profess and to proclaim it. Kingdoms do not suffer, except
accidentally, from the scandal of the ruler's bad life, but when the
spiritual ruler falls it is, necessarily, the very institution and
notion of the spiritual that the scandal harms. His wrong doing
compromises immediately the very raison d’etre of the institution. It
is, in a way, contrary to the very nature of his office and of the
institution. It is disintegration in what only exists in order to
promote integrity; in order to preach that integrity as the inescapable
condition of human happiness, and to minister the divinely devised
means of achieving integrity. Disintegration here must, always, have
about it the air of catastrophe -- no matter how slight the degree in
which it is allowed. And in this sense it is true to say that, over the
history of the fortunes of the supernatural moving visibly among
mankind, there ever hangs something of this dark possibility. "The
gates of hell" shall never, indeed, prevail -- but where was it ever
promised that they should cease to trouble? and was it not also
mysteriously said " When the Son of Man cometh think you shall He find
faith on earth?" The temporal kingdom can not only survive the sins of
its rulers, it can even, for a time, profit from them; the wicked, here
too, flourishing like a green bay tree. But in the spiritual kingdom
sin tolerated, fostered, made an instrument of power, is fatal,
instantaneously, to all that it touches. Sin in the actual ruling of
that kingdom is necessarily not only blacker to the sight but more
mischievous in fact; and so too, are all the personal sins of the
rulers, whether these be such surrenders to the material as sexual
licence, worldliness and avarice, or the still more grievous "
spiritual" sins of ambition, libido dominandi, [ ] mental sloth,
indifference to the development and spread of truth.
|
|
