What Is Truth?
6 THE COMMONWEAL May 8, 1929 WHAT IS TRUTH? RELIGION, to the modern world at large, is a sign written over an abiding quest. The hopelessness of trying...
...But sometimes the clearest light is that which falls suddenly, unawares...
...All of which is neither profound nor logical...
...One reply only seems possible...
...but enlarged out of all relation to facts, evolution distorts reality more radically than any futurism could...
...Now there are great treatises on the modern soul, written from varied points of view...
...the ending of every path in mystery and dissatisfaction of heart...
...What is his influence with the dying, or with the young...
...dub him something more and the laws of the spiritual life are against you...
...Nothing of his is elect excepting that which has endured from eternal days...
...Neither "thought" nor "good intention" can suffice...
...Later on the firmly fixed corporate bodies of Christendom, most of them offshoots from the Catholic Church, became alike "curiously unattractive to people not members of any church...
...For in the garden of flowers to which one may belong, there is never any fear that the rain and the sun will strip the ground from under one's feet, or that the bloom which might have flourished under the gardener's eye will be throttled by alien thorns...
...One's likes or dislikes do not matter...
...Nothing in him matters excepting as grace matters...
...It will never do, in the long run, to conceive of the sacred ministry as an office which the layman can share in any large measure...
...It began to be so, let us admit, in an era when too many clerics invited, unfortunately, enmity against themselves...
...The priest, then, becomes "all things to all men," not because of professional genius—not because he is anything like a doctor or an executive—but simply because the life of the "mystical body" courses through him...
...Probably to think that Christ meant His kingdom to be "a power, a treasure, a possession, a refuge, a place of escape from the too-pressing ills of this world, and open to all with a thought and a good intention...
...Well, our author answers, it is a religious body which expresses one of those "points of view" which Christianity has needed in order to "present itself to the world...
...As all men are rooted to the earth in birth, living and death, so that all thinking and intending can add nothing to their stature, so also must they sink themselves into the "new earth"—the kingdom— if their souls are to endure...
...In other words, we may say it was a definite organic entity destined to expand but not to change...
...But that he should try to discover the meaning of this mysterious difference is obvious...
...This feeling in turn seems a compound of two factors the importance of which can hardly be overemphasized...
...Surely one essential part of this task is to reveal how the Church has grown through the ages as only a living, virile entity could grow...
...The exact counterpart of these fantastic questions is: Will Christianity permit of "evolution" into "modern views" of God's way with man...
...One may reply that a critical inspection of the sources shows that the coming together of Christians in the Church—the "ecclesia"—was by no means haphazard but definitely in accord with the May 8, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 7 Saviour's command...
...Though in His mercy Christ may go abroad and bless multitudes that live alone, in parched cities, He has nevertheless set the law that His own rood has flowered into one tree...
...The hopelessness of trying to cramp into the here and now man's whole personality...
...Precisely because Christianity is important, it cannot be reduced to one formula—at least one outward, ecclesiastical formula...
...Are the laws which govern the reeling of the spheres subject to fantastic change which will end in something like a universe shifted into reverse...
...What is a church...
...Rightly understood, the theory that all things mundane arrive at bloom through growth is an index to creative processes we can never fathom but to the reasonable contemplation of which we may ultimately arrive...
...There is no way out excepting to restore the concept of the Church as an organically living unity, from the roots of which strength flows through every tendril...
...Can a tree "evolve" farther than blossom and fruit...
...The modern world is anticlerical simply because it believes in leveling—leveling classes, leveling moral standards, leveling mental attainments, everything that runs counter to its whims and its sloth...
...Religion, we have said, is now a sign written above a quest...
...The problem is to analyze the idea fully and competently—to see what is true and good in evolution, and to discern what men have unwisely read into it...
...Evolution...
...And the answer...
...At first "ecclesia" meant only "a meeting," says Mr...
...The Protestant divine succeeds in being loved only when he is heroically lovable...
...Humanity, you see, never manifests itself in merely one way...
...But of course, in religion, men would not be so eager for a new dispensation if it were not for a second, radical orientation of their minds...
...And the reply must surely be that when the Master spoke of His kingdom it was as of a mustard seed taking root, or a vine producing branches...
...The modern world is desperately anticlerical...
...In the United States today, where Protestantism has enjoyed an unparalleled opportunity to expand, many more thousands trace their agnosticism to revulsion from a minister than ever took a similar course in the strident days after Chaucer...
...Can history ever be the future, or the defeat of Napoleon a victory...
...And so from the beginning clear tests of life were given—the sacraments, the unitive life (which is not merely the life of one with God, but the life of all in union with God) the walk to Calvary...
...But if our charity and joy ever grew like unto His, the branches would increase a thousandfold...
...Is a verity which mankind comes to know destined for some oddish transmigrations into a dozen other truths...
...Nevertheless time and freedom have only emphasized anticlericalism...
...The concept of evolution has entered so definitely into the modern consciousness that it merits vastly more attention than we usually give to it...
...Basil King the revelation of an important tendency...
...and so we find in a paper recently contributed to McCall's Magazine by Mr...
...Naturally the point becomes clear when you consider how the churches "evolved...
...the loneliness of the individual, forever seeking among friends that ultimate Friend in Whose will there is peace—these things goad thousands on to a spiritual pilgrimage which, however vague the goal finally reached, remains life's deepest and richest experience...
...Among all the images which set forth the world of his faith, none is more direct than that of the seed falling on rich soil...
...Nevertheless it puts the matter as thousands actually do put it in real life...
...Here, after all, is the fundamental application of the parable of him who went down from Jericho and fell among robbers...
...No age has been so quick to chronicle its spiritual peculiarities as our own...
...To how great an extent does he incorporate authority that invites reverence or even approval...
...Secure in the bonds of that august communion which joins saint and sinner in divine affection, he can with difficulty comprehend the restlessness of souls without, to whom authority has given no password to the realm of certainty...
...And what can the thirst and the seeking, the eager waiting and the desolate heart-beat, be for excepting that life which God did not suffer to remain indefinitely apart from our world but placed securely "within us," so that His hearth might be enkindled everywhere...
...That is why literature and the arts can be so constantly rejuvenated...
...King...
...This may be the ultimate substitute for the church...
...Dub him an apologist and he, too, becomes "clerical...
...We are thinking not so much of the development of dogma in Newman's sense, and of that progress in prayer and sanctity, in faith and charity, which is evident particularly in the liturgy...
...A Catholic must summon all his charity to understand...
...King's summary of the facts...
...The mustard seed would not eventually bring forth rosebuds, the branches of the vine could never fade into shadows...
...The Catholic has been boldly anti-individualist, not because he has feared himself but because he has found happiness in the robust vitality of a larger, mystical life...
...To that no one can be grafted by any kind of force...
...At the beginning there was Peter, and Peter was a rock...
...But this reasoning is less effective than it might otherwise be, for the reason that modern people start with a feeling that they have outgrown much once reverenced as final...
...Certainly few historical scholars of the first rank would concede the Tightness of Mr...
...And if one should fail to carry out, so far as one can, the example of the Samaritan, it will follow that the heartless of the Scripture have their modern counterpart in him...
...His is the faculty of transmitting growth and virtue, peace and the ultimate secrets of God...
Vol. 10 • May 1929 • No. 1
