The Course of Conversion, II
Chesterton, G. K.
-604 THE COMMONWEAL October 27, 1926 THE COURSE OF CONVERSION II. THE...
...by Catholic priests...
...The is, properly understood, a fault on the side of chivalry...
...Catholicism is spread by Cathocould any longer hold him back...
...This is what is meant grounds of suspicion or fear that do really fill the by a broad basis for Christianity and the statement convert, and sometimes paralyze him at the very point that there is room for many different opinions side by of conversion, have really nothing in the world to do side...
...Its protagonist is a humble and unlettered country priest, immune to the Sous le Soleil de Satan, by Georges Bernanos...
...But it is that sort of pared to regard as holy or more than human ; and man who proselytizes in that sort of way...
...grandeur of a great love affair...
...There are, of course, with it a reminder of what has been already noted: many other examples of the same principle: that there I mean the fact that whatever be the Catholic's woris, indeed, an interval of acute doubt, which is, strictly ries, they are the very contrary of the Protestant's speaking, fear rather than doubt, since in some cases warnings...
...But when it comes to any today what will be a commonplace tomorrow...
...It is worth not frightened because, after taking this drug, he will while, for practical reasons, to testify to such experibe henceforward irresponsible...
...two uncomfortable condi- why we should not know how to defend it...
...for in most moment they try to be fair to it they begin to be fond communions the ecclesiastical layman is more eccle- of it...
...The La Vie Catholique, precedes his estimate, not always devil has grown to be as unfashionable as he is un- favorable, of it from the religious and orthodox point fathomable...
...But even that extravagance in scattering money among the mob...
...Realism is description can somehow be made to cover the Tol- really a rock of offense...
...The laity are probably less wise...
...And by a paramade his way toward the trap of truth, and not the dox that does not frighten me now in the least, it may trap that has run after the man...
...and who are we that we should set narrow enough to have yet discovered its reasonableness and dogmatic limits to the various ways in which various its common sense...
...of having been in a sense entrapped, even if doubts than in the last phase, when I was troubled he is glad to be entrapped...
...But if inaction of the priest may be something like the statu- he says that clericalism is the enemy, he is repeating esque stillness of the angler...
...THE DEVIL AT NOONDAY By HENRY LONGAN STUART T HE Ahrimanian sect, we are told, worshipped five months it has been hard to take up any of the the devil, but refrained from ever mentioning more serious reviews without finding some reference his unpleasant name...
...Reformation give freedom to different points of view, The short way of putting it is to say that he is no he means that they give freedom to the Universalist longer afraid of the vices, but very much afraid of to curse Rome for having too much predestination the virtues of Catholicism...
...fears of something that had trap, or the priests who have baited it...
...At least once ambitious native publisher, who is often driven to a week-and probably oftener-if we are Catholics, strange places to gather in his harvest of praise, water we join in the prayer, made when the sacrifice for sin with envy...
...the man who has come so far inconsistencies of the intermediate condition, he may as that along the road has long left behind him the do a great deal of harm of the kind that he least innotion that the priest will force him to abandon his tends to do...
...The latter as much as any other...
...Before that final delay I had been detached time he is not so much glad as simply terrified...
...It is hard to destined tempo of an arithmetical progression...
...Hilaire Belloc or rain beating upon the Ark...
...For the object to laymen proselytizing...
...and if you were half as much afraid, you tween us and the warm and broadening human brother- would run away...
...M. Calvet, of Mencken and his Americana rises before us...
...The moment they cease to shout it it is nothing merely external that is tugging at his down they begin to listen to it with pleasure...
...Perhaps it is just as well that peohood of all who are full of sincere and unaffected ple go through this stage before discovering how very dislike of their neighbors...
...But for a considerable by fears...
...The name several times a day, but belief in his personal list of appreciations is one to make the mouth of the activities has grown a tenuous affair...
...604 THE COMMONWEAL October 27, 1926 THE COURSE OF CONVERSION II...
...He will turn begins converting...
...Indeed, the only sense in of the crime, but has actually charged it with the op- which the priests and propagandists of Catholicism posite crime...
...The whole point is that the man himself has certain I grew of what Thing it was...
...enough to say that this is perhaps the supreme example Such is the larger and more liberal modern attack of the fact that the Faith is a paradox that measures upon the Church...
...But when that affection has passed a certain 6o6 THE COMMONWEAL October 27, 1926 point it begins to take on the tragic and menacing last stage, only alarms him because it is so very true...
...A man may say if he likes that that, through those long and dark and indecisive days, Catholicism is the enemy...
...Paris: commoner and baser forms of temptation which at Librairie Plon, Plan-Nourrit and Company...
...Merely as a matter of personal experience, at least (as I shall point out elsewhere) there is actu- I have been led to note here that it is not generally the ally least doubt when there is most fear...
...The liberty...
...not unnatural in the functions of a fisher of men...
...I am not likely to complain he has already learned to expect, like a blind hail or of the evangelizing energy of Mr...
...but the voices from within, Mr...
...which has received the attention that is being given Those who follow French literature, even cursorily, to M. Georges Bernanos's study of the devil, per- are probably by now in possession of the bare outsonal, active, and even corporeal when it suits his line of Sous le Soleil de Satan, indeed it is hard to purpose-Sous le Soleil de Satan.* For some four or see how they could escape it...
...Since that delay has ended in decision, I have misunderstood by stupider people and is responsible had all sorts of changes in mere mood...
...Why through this experience have a certain right to say, should we allow a cold difficulty of the logician, tech- like the old soldier to his ignorant comrade, "Yes, I nically called a contradiction in terms, to stand be- was afraid...
...For (definite estimate of his ravages, to any admission that Frederic Lefevre, of La Vie Litteraire, one of the he is still up and doing among us, with activities un- pontiffs of French criticism on whom the mantle of abated, and with no more limit set to his power than Sainte-Beuve or Lemaitre seems most obviously to in the old days when the righteousness of Job was have descended, its possession and appreciation is alfelt as a challenge to his professional vanity, we grow most a matter of conscience: "It should be on the vague and a little self-conscious...
...I merely give this here out of a It is quite false, in my experience, to say that Jesuits, hundred examples, as showing once again that the or any other Roman priests, pester and persecute peo- old traditional version of the terrors of Popery was ple in order to proselytize...
...of view with the picturesque and final expression In France things are rather different...
...There is many a convert who has reached a by any particular professional tricks or tones or secret stage at which no word from any Protestant or pagan signs or ceremonies...
...Only the word of a lics...
...but he is sometimes frightened perience of the militant layman...
...and if he expresses his It is the same with all the other points of attack, irritation at the slow process of conversion, or the especially the old ones...
...I had only fears...
...Today we mention his to M. Bernanos's powerful and hair-raising novel...
...tions which his more fortunate fellow-creatures have Yet even that one trivial or incidental caution carries nowadays entirely escaped...
...But he is very much ence, because it may guide the convert when he in his frightened because he will be responsible...
...gotten all about the old nonsense of the cunning lies He means that in that happy family there is a place of the confessional in his lively and legitimate alarm for the "no Popery" man who finds purgatory too of the truthfulness of the confessional...
...There Mr...
...Protestant pamcism has been turned clean round and is facing phlets do not touch even remotely any of the real hesithe contrary way...
...THE MEDDLESOME LAYMAN By G. K. CHESTERTON THE whole case of Protestantism against Catholi- by the more ancient Protestants...
...with this old crop of crude slanders and fallacies, and When the Reformer says that the principles of the are often the very inversion of them...
...He means that the same is he necessarily insincere in doing so...
...Our enemies no longer really have somebody to be responsible to and he will know know how to attack the Faith ; but that is no reason what he is responsible for...
...The think of a book published in recent years, certainly copy in the writer's hands, printed weeks or even of no book written by a new and unknown author, months ago, is marked the twentieth thousand...
...and such an attitude is a catchword...
...and proselyte...
...least give the ordinary man or woman a solid foot...
...The were a sort of vampire or a monster intrinsically difCatholic is scarcely ever frightened of the Protestant ferent from mankind, vanishes with the smallest expicture of Catholicism...
...priest, but much more often the layman, who rather But anyhow, the doubts are hardly ever of the sort too ostentatiously compasses sea and land to make one suggested by ordinary anti-Catholic propaganda...
...The priest does his of the Catholic picture of Catholicism...
...On practically every single tations that he feels...
...The whole the finality and simplicity of suicide...
...Public support, Mencken (or Monsieur Homais, for the name does as only too rarely happens, is solidly behind critical not greatly matter) is a familiar figure...
...if only because I owe to it the most even the most casual and accidental, he is already pre- intelligent talks of my youth...
...But the more point of the position is that the trap is simply the I thrust the thing into the back of my mind, the more truth...
...It is a satisfaction, and almost siastical than is good for his health, and certainly a joke, that it is only in a dark corner and a cramped much more ecclesiastical than the ecclesiastics...
...the inquisitor has more respect for the heresy about whether he should go to the hell of the misers than the heretics have...
...At every sparrow or fieldfare of letters makes no excuse for library in France it is reported as the "quickest movperching on his horizontal arms and picking the straws, ing" novel in years...
...For instance, he has forand to the Calvinist to curse her for having too little...
...In any case, I will not of the head...
...But It is impossible to be just to the Catholic Church...
...and I think for all that remains of the legend that Rome is a I sympathize with doubts and difficulties more than mere trap...
...It is not the Pope who has set the before...
...It and ready to regard all sorts of doctrines with an open may be that this real psychological experience has been mind...
...Religion is of the heart, little there is to be afraid of...
...But confessional-box, that is like a church within a church...
...bookshelves of every upright man...
...nor man who finds hell too harsh...
...My space that any man can discover that mountain of experience is that the amateur is generally much magnanimity...
...But he is not unreasonably dismayed at the ex- experienced a slight setback whenever some irrespontent to which he may have to use his will...
...It will be about what there is to be hated...
...and even Catholic pamphlets point on which the Reformation accused the Church, have often been concerned too much with answering the modern world has not only acquitted the Church the Protestant pamphlets...
...and he may be stating from it is the man who persecutes himself...
...He does not tender-hearted and also for the other "no Popery" recoil from its insincerity, but from its sincerity...
...But that legend misses the whole point of I did before...
...and even the last step, or the last effort to deny it...
...But I had no doubts or difficulties just the psychology...
...but not certainly, in private life at least, merely Catholic can keep him from Catholicism...
...All the creepy and uncanny whispers about it is surely time that such propagandists brought them- the horror of having the priest in the home, as if he selves more in touch with the real problem...
...Eric Gill...
...in a somewhat analogous fashion, it will be found It is almost a good thing that nobody outside should that the real difficulties of a modern convert are al- know what gigantic generosity, and even geniality, can most )he direct contrary of those which were alleged be locked up in a box, as the legendary casket held October 27, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 6o~ the heart of the giant...
...The man has exactly If I may refer once more to a personal experience, I the same sense of having committed or compromised may say that I for one was never less troubled by himself...
...I do not difficult or puzzling parts of the scheme...
...and as long as all our hearts are full say little more of that example here, having a feeling of a hatred for everything that our fathers loved, that absolution, like death and marriage, is a thing we can go on flatly contradicting each other forever that a man ought to find out for himself...
...It is quite inconsistent with the more within than without...
...The perkiest approval, if it did not even precede it...
...Most of those who have gone temperaments may desire to blame them...
...has been consummated, to be delivered "from Satan M. Leon Daudet, in hailing it as a landmark in and other evil spirits, who wander through the world French literature, declares that he is only uttering seeking the ruin of souls...
...All steps, except the be that I shall never again have such absolute assurlast step, he has taken eagerly on his own account, out ance that the thing is true as I had when I made my of interest in the truth...
...I know in my own case that I always will...
...He is sible individual interposed to urge me on...
...The fear of Mr...
...He is near enough to the sacrament of tial aim of true Christianity is that priests should be penance to have discovered its realism and not near blamed...
...but it does not propose to lose smallest church, it is truer still of the yet smaller the advantages arising from any sort of attack...
...Catholicism is not spread member...
...principle of modern Protestantism seems to be that so The preacher, and even the persecutor, really takes long as we go on shouting "To hell with the Pope" the heresy more seriously than it is seen ultimately to there is room for the widest differences of opinion deserve...
...Its movement has had the preone by one, from his bulging chest...
...If that be true of the old doctrinal attack...
...which may be job, but it is much more his secular coreligionist who a good reason for not disproportionately stressing the is disposed to explain it and talk about it...
...and the conthough this is unfair to people who only profess to be ventional caricature is wrong again when it always human beings, it is a fact that Catholics ought to re- represents him in a cassock...
...and most modern realists only manage patriotism and the Diehard who blames priests because to like it because they are careful to be realistic about they represent internationalism...
...After all, the essen- other people...
...angrier than the professional...
...The apparent his point of view a profound spiritual truth...
...it is not at all unnatural to stoyan who blames priests because they permit shrink from it...
...It takes the reader by the throat...
...It is as if the Reformers had mobbed can really be said to be behind the times is that they the Pope for being a miser, and then the court had sometimes go on flogging a dead horse and killing a not only acquitted him, but had censured him for his heresy long after it has killed itself...
...Nobody has any notion almost always wrong, even where it might possibly of what the whole story is about, who does not know have been right...
...it is very seldom impatient or premature and the per- The moment men cease to pull against it they feel a son acted upon is quite lonely enough to realize that tug toward it...
...for I never could see, convert's sake, it should also be remembered that one even when I was practically a pagan, why a man should foolish word from inside does more harm than a hun- not urge his own opinions if he liked, and that opinion dred thousand foolish words from outside...
...Still, it is true that the or the hell of the spendthrifts...
Vol. 4 • October 1926 • No. 25
