The Ark and the Dove
THE ARK AND THE DOVE ON the face of it, history should be the most exact of all the sciences. It is obvious that whatever has happened, from the very earliest day of which record exists at all,...
...But it is at least to its credit that its movement has been bi-lateral, and that, in its 226 THE COMMONWEAL January 6, 1926 chosen function of demolishing facts unsupported by evidence that satisfies itself, it has uprooted many a fable that tangled the feet of the truth-seeker for generations—disinterred and restored to its proper perspective many an obscure fact that those who wrote history to flatter racial and religious vanity had been pleased to ignore...
...For years past, Father La Farge, S.J., ministering to his parishioners at the very place—the site of St...
...The result has come about, not so much through any conscious suppression of facts as from the emphasis that has been laid upon one or two aspects of the great settlement, to the detriment of others...
...A happy coincidence brings it about that the celebration of the golden jubilee of the American Catholic Historical Society in 1934 will coincide with the tercentenary of Catholic Maryland...
...As a matter of fact, nothing is so falsified, so colored with prejudice and the will to believe or disbelieve as the history of races and nations...
...As we approach the era where contemporary records accrue, the case is not very much better...
...W. T. Russell, the historian of Maryland, "the persecuted for conscience' sake of every creed might find an end of persecution and a peaceful home"—where every man who would not insult the beliefs of his neighbor might "build a cabin he might call his home," and where the Catholic asked only the same tolerance he was ready to extend to Puritan, Prelatist, Quaker, and Jew, will take his place as the great historical portent he really is—immensely impressive by reason of his very sweetness and simplicity, and immensely significant because he was a herald, at least a century and a half in advance, of the spirit of religious freedom on which the republic has grown up, broad-based and unshakable by the winds of religious strife...
...But no history of their brave attempt to establish a kingdom of God upon earth will ever be acceptable to the impartial Catholic historian which does not take into account the prejudices they shared with their generation, and for the sake of their honesty and bravery condone much that is harsh and unlovely in their story...
...If ever an opportunity seemed to present itself for a straightforward and impartial treatment, it was here...
...Perhaps one of the most hopeful signs of our present confused epoch, in which so much that calls for indignation and despondency is mingled with so much that challenges admiration, is a new respect for honest and scientific history...
...The feeling of the honest historian who finds the springs of history clouded and poisoned at their source partakes something of this divine sentiment of indignation...
...Mary's City—where the Jesuit fathers landed in 1634, has been urging American Catholics to take an interest in the subject of these English pioneers...
...The duty of the said Catholic historian none the less, after due tribute has been paid by him to the Protestant elements in America's founding, is to strive, by every means in his power, to redress the injustice which has permitted figures no less heroic to suffer an eclipse which is not justified on grounds of their character and significance...
...The need to make history a continuous narrative, no matter how obscure and patchy are its records, inevitably begets the speculative spirit in its narrators...
...One of the things that is fated inevitably to change as this new method of writing and judging history makes its way through the work of the scientific historian, often unknown and inaccessible, into text-books, school-manuals and finally into its right place in the national consciousness, is the history of our own country...
...Yet it would not be over-stating the case to say that the net result of recording three centuries of human effort in the new world has been to present the world at large with a conception of the founding fathers that is intrinsically false and partial...
...The duty of the historian is no longer to pick his way from one disparate landmark to another...
...Two thousand years ago the greatest Thinker of all speculated upon what might happen to the world if the salt wherewith it was salted became corrupted...
...The prejudice and passion that battened on the old partisan presentation of facts are things of the past with a growing number of students...
...Whatever form the Maryland celebrations take at Baltimore (and it is hard to believe that the enthusiasm of American Catholics will not finally develop them into some such historical pageant as that which a few years ago reconstituted the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers at Plymouth) one thing is certain...
...The unforgettable figure of the humane and singleminded English nobleman, upon whose imagination the vision dawned of a sanctuary in the new world, where the religious enmity that was turning Europe into a desert might cease—where, in the words of Mr...
...Peter Guilday, its retiring president, "the collection of materials for the history of the Catholic Church in this country from 1634 to 1934, to engage the services of expert archivists and writers who would prepare the source materials for such a history, and to make more available the treasures we have gathered during the long years of our existence...
...The literature that has grown up around the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay pilgrims, the wealth of poetry, prose and oratory that has helped to enshrine their legend in the consciousness of the smallest child of school age, is all to the credit of the men and women who shared their blood and faith...
...Partly, of course, this is due to a lack of material, the dreaded hiatus which one finds recurring over and over again, often at the very conjunctures where the student is in most need of illumination...
...Here the very multiplicity of material is the difficulty...
...The Ark and the Dove, fragile vessels in which Leonard Calvert, Lord Baltimore, carried the seed of tolerance to the new land, will take their place in the national legend beside the Mayflower, none the less—perhaps all the more imperishably because a century and a half was to pass while the ark floated on stormy and perilous waters, and before the dove found dry land on which to rest her gentle feet...
...The Pilgrim Fathers were bitterly opposed to very many things for which Catholicism stands...
...The very naivete of the earliest historians preserved them from deliberate deception...
...It is obvious that whatever has happened, from the very earliest day of which record exists at all, can have happened one way, and one way only...
...The story of our nation began in days when printed records had replaced legend and word-ofmouth tradition...
...It was comparatively meagre in its succession of events, but these events were of such dramatic intensity, and the eyes of the world were so riveted upon them, that hardly one escaped the attention of contemporary judgment and criticism...
...He has to blaze a trail through a positive tangle of misstatement and misrepresentation...
...The coincidence offers a dramatic opportunity to impress upon the mind of the nation the debt it owes to Catholic effort from the very dawn of its history, and it is gratifying to know that the very alert and hard-working body which antedates the founding of the American Historical Society by some years, is not going to let it escape...
...America at large will receive such an impression of the part played by Catholics in the founding of their country as will put the partial and incomplete story familiar to them into the discard where the new history is throwing so many false and misleading impressions, accepted thoughtlessly for so many years...
...Scepticism may have worked harm where dogmatic belief is concerned...
...This is as true of the most elaborate minutiae as of the great events which stand out as landmarks and to regard which as turning points and watersheds in the story of mankind, a general agreement has been reached...
...But no sooner does the contemporary historian become conscious of his function than the propagandist, even the forger, steps in...
...Theory rushes in, as it were, to supply the vacuum created by the absence of fact...
...At its annual meeting a couple of weeks ago, a movement was launched to spend the intervening years "to complete," in the words of Dr...
...The general impression that history, as it approaches our own day, swells to a crescendo of credibility, is not borne out by experience...
Vol. 3 • January 1926 • No. 9
