Gold, frankincense and myrrh

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GOLD

FRANKINCENSE

AND MYRRH

By

RALPH ADAMS CRAM

LITT.D., LL.D.

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BOSTON

MARSHALL JONES COMPAVY

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Copyright^ igiQ
By Marshall Jones Company

All rights reserved
First printing, November, 191 9

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THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

Preface vii

MONASTICISM AND THE WoRLD CrISIS I

Sacramentalism and the Future . 34
The Philosophical Necessity . . 67

PREFACE

OF the three addresses that make up
i this volume, the first was delivered
in 191 7 before the students of the
General Theological Seminary in New
York, the second at the fiftieth anniversary
of the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacra-
ment, at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin
in New York, in 191 8, while the third was
read at a meeting of the Clerical Brother-
hood of the Episcopal Church in the Dio-
cese of Pennsylvania, at Philadelphia, in
19 19. All three have been published in
The American Church Monthly, and per-
mission to reprint has been given by the
editor, the Reverend Selden Peabody De-
lany, D.D. The third of the- addresses,
"The Philosophical Necessity," has also
been republished by the Reverend Thomas
Edward Shields, D.D., in The Catholic
Educational Review,

For the doctrines, statements and infer-
ences that are to be found in the three
addresses, oo responsibility can in any de-

[vii]

PREFACE

gree be attached to the governing body of
the General Theological Seminary or to
the officers of the Confraternity of the
Blessed Sacrament or to the Bishop of
Pennsylvania. The various papers were
read without having been first given a
nihil obstat by any one in authority, and
I desire to take entirely on my own shoul-
ders the responsibility for what I have
said. As the third essay is in a sense an
extension ^and amplification of the second,
and as it was given before a different audi-
ence, certain repetitions occur, but it has
seemed best to leave the papers in their
original estate, except that from the second
has been omitted the philosophical argu-
ment for the doctrine of Transubstantiation
(this also was left out in The American
Church Monthly) which was later ampli-
fied into the Philadelphia address.

The title "Gold, Frankincense and
Myrrh" means simply this: Gold is the
pure, imperishable quality of the monastic
ideal, Frankincense the supreme act of
worship through the Blessed Sacrament,
Myrrh the saving quality of a right philoso-
phy of life that yet must be bitter to the
taste of many people. Together they are

[ viii ]

PREFACE

the three gifts that must again be offered
by a world once more led, though now by
the red and malefic star of war, to worship
and fall down before the Incarnate God
so long and so lightly denied.

RALPH ADAMS CRAM.
23rd June, 1919.

[ ix]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE
AND MYRRH

MONASTICISM AND THE
WORLD CRISIS

I IKE all the manifestations of natural
forces, like the pulsing of the life-
-* blood, like life itself, history is a
system of vast vibrations, systole and diastole
beating eternally, but with nodes that are
separated not by fractional seconds, but by
intervals of five centuries. From the day
of the Incarnation, back through Europe,
Asia, Africa, until chronology merges in
myth and tradition, and on, even to this
day, and so forward until the end, this
enormous vibration controls and conditions
man, and he plays his part on the rise, the
crest, or the descent of the wave, helpless
to change its course or to avert its fall.

The fable of evolution, the delusion of
continuous progress, the dream of the final
perfectibility of man on earth, break down
and die under the hard light of universal
catastrophe, vanishing with all the other
illusions of modernism that have made that
catastrophe not a ghastly accident but an

[ I 1

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

expiation and a potential redemption, while
blinding the world to its implacable ap-
proach. For the individual there may be
progress, but the rise from birth to maturity
is followed by declension to the grave. For
the community or the state there may be
progress, but the upward sweep of the elan
vital curves at last, in its brief trajectory, to
merge again in the inert mass through
which it sprang, and the jungles of Asia,
the sands of African deserts, the forests of
Europe hide the forgotten shards of uni-
versal civilizations whose names are words
only, and whose deeds are of the dust that
buries their monuments. For mankind it-
self there may be progress, out of periodical
misery and oblivion, upward to honour and
dignity and worth and power, but always
the parabola traces its dying fall, and this
spurt of progress lasts not five centuries,
beyond which term nothing may pass with-
out failure, extinction and supersession.

History is a series of resurrections, for
the rhythm of change is invariable. Each
epoch of five hundred years follows the
same monotonous course, though made dis-
tinctive by new; variations. Since the Chris-
tian era Imperial Rome has risen, culmi-

[2]

MONASTICISM AND WORLD CRISIS

nated and disappeared ^' under the drums
and tramplings of four conquests." The
Eastern Empire has succeeded, with the
first congeries of Christian states in the
West. Mediaevalism has burst like a new
day on Europe, to go to its end five cen-
turies later as our own epoch began its
astounding career. The birth of Christ,
the years 500, 1000, 1500, are nodal points
when all that had been ceased and new
things came into being: before the year
2000, now but two generations away, mod-
ern civilization will have passed and a
new era have taken its place. Already
the whirlwind of destruction has overtaken
it, and for more than three years, it has
suffered the first of the assaults that will
in the end make it one with Babylon and
with Nineveh.

We are today in the midst of just such a
grinding collapse as that which overtook
Rome and the empire of Charlemagne
and the Christian Commonwealths of the
Middle Ages, and we shall escape no more
than they. Neither scientific accomplish-
ment nor efficiency, neither parliamentary
government nor industrialism, neither
wealth nor self-confidence, neither pacifism

[3]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

nor neutrality can save us, for we have
reached the crest of folly that crowns
achievement, and beyond lies the shudder-
ing fall into the trough of the heaving
sea. But the wave, if it falls, rises again,
and history, if it shouts its warning, whis-
pers also its hope. If night follows day,
day follows night, and since Christ came
we have not only the hope but the way.
And the way has never changed in essence,
though it has varied widely in its manifesta-
tions. As Rome fell, St. Benedict of Nursia
rose above the welter of ruin to save what
might be saved and to build society anew.
As the first Holy Roman Empire broke
down in ruin, St. Odo of Cluny in his turn
saved something from the wreck, began
the new era of Christian civilization in
the North, and gave it to St. Robert of
Molesmes, who transformed it by Cister-
cianism into a thing of unexampled nobil-
ity and fixed forever the standard type of
Christian society. When at last this also
began to decline, its time having arrived, a
sudden new life swept through the mori-
bund orders, — Benedictine, Cistercian, Do-
minican, — -making them once more con-
structive and regenerative agencies, while

[4]

MONASTICISM AND WORLD CRISIS

by means of an entirely novel version of the
monastic method, St. Ignatius Loyola
stopped the progress of devouring heresy
and concentrated in centres of tremendous
dynamic force the shattered and dislocated
elements of Catholic Christianity, that they
might engender the counter-reformation
and preserve fundamental Christianity until
better days.

So in the first years of the sixth cen-
tury, the last years of the tenth, and the
first years of the sixteenth, at intervals
of approximately ^ye hundred years, just
at the nodal point v^here one era was
dying in dishonour, and another rising in
pov^er, came a new outpouring of monastic
fervour to save and to recreate. In the year
927 St. Odo promulgated the reformed rule
of the Order of Cluny, and the Dark Ages
came to an end within sixty years, to give
place to Christian civilization. One thou-
sand years from then will bring us to the
year 1927, but we need not wait until then
for the assurance that God has again been
merciful and given the world a new hope,
for nearly fifty years ago came the first
evidences of the new life, and now the
death of civilization seals the early assur-

[5]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

ance, and everywhere may be seen the
stirrings of the Holy Spirit leading men
once more into this earthly army of God.

For it is the consecrated Religious Life
that has been the divine agency for the sav-
ing of the world at all its moments of most
critical peril; and if you will study the
phenomena of periodic degeneration, and
the spirit and method of monasticism, you
will see that this must inevitably be so. As
each era of the world reaches its fulfilment,
it suddenly festers into five cancerous sores:
wealth and luxury, lust and licentiousness,
wilfulness and individualism, leading in
the end to anarchy, envy and egotism, and
finally the idleness of the parasite. You
will find most of these, in varying measure,
in the last years of Rome, of the Carolin-
gian Empire and the Eastern Empire, of
the epoch of Mediaevalism ; and you will
find them all, and without measure, in the
last years of the nineteenth and the elapsed
years of the twentieth century.

Now against them the Religious Life
has set the three great evangelical councils
of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience, add-
ing to them two other principles of equal
value, viz.. Brotherhood and Work. Each

[6]

MONASTICISM AND WORLD CRISIS

is the explicit negation and corrective of
some one of the sins of success, and together
they form the energizing force that brings
a new era into being.

There is no other way. As an era dies,
it engenders an all-embracing mortality in
its members, and there is nothing essentially
of itself, either in its works or its men, that
retains regenerative power. When an age
dies, it dies altogether, though such spirit-
ual force as it may have generated continues
beyond its own decadence and fall as a
slowly dissipating impulse in art. In the
end this is dispersed and art ceases for the
time, but it never had a truly vital quality
in the establishing and determining of
spiritual values, finding its function only in
an empty aestheticism that ended at last in
the various historical predecessors of art
nouveau and vers libre. As in all life, the
dynamic impulse towards new things comes
from without, a sudden jet of the elan vital,
expressing itself through a swift intensifica-
tion — exaggeration if you like — of those
fundamental principles of all wholesome
society that have been lost out of life and
must in some way be restored.

It is not necessary to maintain that the

[ 7]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

monastic life is an universal ideal : the claim
is not even made. It is rather a highly
special form of life, normally fitted for
comparatively few men and women ; but at
abnormal times, such as the closing years of
an epoch, it becomes not a refuge but a duty
and a call to sacrifice. The army is not
the normal life for all, but at critical mo-
ments, when honour and justice and eternal
truths are imperilled, it sends its clear call
to all men for holy service in warfare.
Nothing can take its place; none of the
agencies of peace and order may serve;
and if men do not arise, and at any cost,
even of life itself, range themselves in the
front of battle, nothing follows but hu-
miliation, disaster, and the death of more
than men and women and children.

The Religious Life is a life of continual
sacrifice, but nothing of enduring value in
the world has been attained except through
sacrifice. Wealth and ease, peace and
plenty, material success and serene content,
never won anything, either for the indi-
vidual, the community or the state, while
they lead inevitably to decadence and
downfall. Adversity and suffering, sorrow
and labour and sacrifice, are the builders

[ 8 ]

MONASTICISM AND WORLD CRISIS

of character, the foundation-stones of right-
eous civilization. Out of these sacrifices
that monasticism demands, has come for
myriads of men and women more than
adequate personal compensation, as this
comes to the soldier in the trenches of
France, dying a clean death in a holy cause.
This, however, is only a by-product; the
great thing is the unique and splendid op-
portunity for service, for the doing of what
no one else can do, and this the noblest
service that man can render to man. For
more than two years millions of men and
boys have sacrificed all that life could give
to save something from the wreck of a
world, and their sacrifice will not be in vain
so far as the first victory at arms is con-
cerned. It will, in the end, have been in
vain if there are not now the few thousands
of their brothers to make their smaller
sacrifice in order that the victory they have
bought with their blood may be sealed by
that spiritual regeneration which always
has been, and always will be, the work of
those whom God has called to the Religious
Life.

As we look back through history we can
see how terrible was the fall, how gross the

[9]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

enveloping darknesss of the end of An-
tiquity, of the close of the Dark Ages, of
the break-up of Mediaevalism. We cannot
imagine what fearful fate must have over-
taken the world if it had not been for the
followers of the consecrated Religious Life,
from St. Benedict to St. Ignatius Loyola.
Today the fall and the darkness are more
profound than ever before, except possibly
at the end of the Roman Empire; there-
fore the old call is more insistent as the need
is correspondingly greater. Everything
with which and by which our modern era
has lived, shatters before us, and no visible
foundation remains. Protestantism and
free thought, parliamentary government
and democracy, natural science, industrial
civilization and material efficiency, evo-
lutionary philosophy, pragmatism, deter-
minism, freedom of speech and freedom of
the press and compulsory public education
— all these, and their myriad concomitants,
crumble, totter, and melt away before the
Frankenstein monster they themselves had
created.

I do not mean that all these proud prod-
ucts of modernism now show themselves as
entirely empt}^ delusions, for the greater

[ lo]

MONASTICISM AND WORLD CRISIS

part of them express some element of truth
or usefulness. In every case, however, they
have either been exaggerated out of all
reason, falsified by removal from contact
with some other opposed principle which
alone could have acted as a corrective, or
finally their original idea has been lost sight
of under some mechanistic incubus we have
invented as a means to an end, and then have
accepted as the end in itself, to the utter
forgetfulness of the object of our labour,
which has consequently disappeared. An
example of what I mean is democracy,
which is a splendid ideal in itself, and
worth fighting for; but for a century we
have been so ridiculously busy in inventing
new engines for creating it, in discovering
new panaceas for correcting our intermin-
able failures, that at last we have not the
remotest idea in what democracy consists,
and actually, in the midst of an insane
phantasmagoria of political devices, have
seen not only the humiliating failure of
these patented nostrums but the almost
complete disappearance of the democratic
idea as a moving cause or even as a dim and
mythical tradition.

So it is with the other things I have

[ II ]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

named, and as they break down visibly
before us, we realize that the very founda-
tions of life are overturned, that our light
has become darkness, and we have no guide
for our steps. We have made our world
over to suit ourselves, and at the very mo-
ment when we look on it and see that it
is good, it crumbles into mere debris; hol-
low, unsubstantial, insecure, it cannot en-
dure the touch of real life, and breaks in
pieces of its own unwieldiness.

In all this there is no ground for final
discouragement. All depends on how we
meet the crisis, how we bear the test, with
what standards we measure the new, hard,
and even appalling things that are put be-
fore us. At last Calvinism is no longer
upon us, to weigh us down under a base
fatalism. We know our choice is free, and
we may will a new Dark Ages or a new Ren-
aissance — better still a new Medisevalism.
All depends on how we, ourselves, meet the
issue.

For this vast cataclysm is not a trying
out of individuals, or of a few nations, but
of all men, east, west, north and south.
None may escape, for, each in its own de-
gree, every race on earth lies under the

[ 12]

MONASTICISM AND WORLD CRISIS

same condemnation, from Russia, which
had surrendered least, to Prussia, which
had surrendered all. A system nearly five
centuries old is being tried that it may be
destroyed, and destroyed that something
better may take its place.

As five centuries ago, and ten and fifteen
and twenty, the saving motive will be the
Catholic Faith, poured out anew upon the
nations; and as five centuries ago, and ten
and fifteen, the visible and divinely directed
means will be the consecrated Religious
Life. Not through archaic and pictorial
revivals, but under the drive of a new spirit-
ual consciousness implanted in man by God
the Holy Ghost, working itself out under
old rules and under reformed rules, but
in essence what it always has been and al-
ways will be. Monasticism — I use the term
generally as including all types of monks,
friars, canons-regular, and missionaries
bound under the vows of poverty, chastity,
and obedience — is divine in its essence and
its order, therefore an essential and inde-
structible portion of the visible Catholic
Church, but it is manifested through hu-
man agencies, therefore fallible and des-
tined to decay and to demand reform;

[13 ]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

destined equally to adapt itself to new
times and to new conditions. Within these
great and closing walls of poverty, chas-
tity and obedience, brotherhood and work,
it will transmute itself into new forms, but
always there will be three great classes,
the general motive of which will never
change, and the demand for which, and
for all, was never more insistent than
today; and these three are the monk, the
friar and the canon-regular. Let me try
to show why each is needed today, whether
he lives under the old rules of St. Bene-
dict, St Francis or St. Augustine, or under
some modification thereof.

The ideal of the true monk is furthest
from the spirit of today — or rather of
yesterday. There is no " today," but only
an interlude of anarchy, and the monk is
therefore more essential at this crisis than
the friar or the canon-regular, however
imperative may be the demand for both,
and the demand is insistent and clamorous.
The friar and the canon-regular are the
workers of visible things, and a w^orld of
efficiency and " the strenuous life," whose
gospel is " get results," can measurably un-
derstand them. The monk, cloistered, shut

[ 14]

MONASTICISM AND WORLD CRISIS

away from active contact with the world,
living a life of rigid abstinence, praying,
praising God and giving himself over to
intercession, adoration and worship, is to
the world unthinkable, but it is at times
like this that the world needs him most.
Action — feverish, insistent, universal —
has built up a world that has failed, and out
of that failure will come the consciousness
that the real things in life are of the spirit,
not of the flesh, not of man but of God.
Great and glorious works have come from
the labours of men, whether they were
Religious or seculars or laymen, but the
greatest things came, not from their physi-
cal action but from their spiritual energy;
and though with their hands they have built
up great fabrics of civilization and given
them life through the energy of ordered
intellects, the soul of these civilizations
came as the gift of God, through His saints,
and because of the prayers and intercessions
and the worship of His children. The
monk who made a desert into a garden, or
turned a heathen people from savagery, did
well, but he did better when prostrating
himself in prayer in the silence of his cell,
or when he joined with his brethren in be-
ds ]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

seeching Our Lady and the saints for their
intercessions, or in worshipping the incar-
nate God in the Holy Sacrament of the
Altar.

Our age is dying because it has lost
spiritual energy, and therefore no longer
knows the difference between the real and
the false, the temporal and the eternal, be-
tween right and wrong, and this spiritual
energy is to be restored, not by action, but
by the grace of God, — and by prayer alone
is this grace given to men. We need the
spiritual energy that emanates from the
hushed cloisters and the dim chapels of
brotherhoods of monks, and the invincible
force of their intercessions. If only we
knew that here and there, hidden in the still
country-side, the sons of St. Benedict, as they
were in the sixth century and the eleventh,
were fighting, day and night, the spiritual
battle that is more arduous even than the
physical, we could take heart of hope where
now is opportunity for little but despair.

Thus far, with us, scant progress has been
made towards the restoration of a strict
monasticism, all our new orders having
been formed along the lines of communities
of canons-regular or friars. Caldey tried it,

[ i6]

MONASTICISM AND WORLD CRISIS

and poor Father Ignatius even earlier, but
Ecclesia Anglicana had no place for that
sort of thing and Caldey was forced, by the
logic of consistency, to make its submission
to Rome. Even there too much time v^as
given to preaching far afield, and to other
extraneous objects, just as, under the Roman
obedience, the Benedictine houses have
largely forsaken their ordained work, in the
interests of schools and missions, and even
the cure of souls. The spirit of strict mo-
nasticism seems almost wholly to have died
away, and because of this the present peril
of the world is increased. Unless it can be
restored, now, without loss of time, the
immediate future can give little hope. Un-
fortunately to few is given the monastic
vocation, and when it is vouchsafed, only
too often the doubtful listener closes his
ears, thinking, under the black inheritance
of strenuousness, that action alone will '' get
results," and that he has no right to remain
outside the ranks of those who are everlast-
ingly '' up and doing.*" For the restoration
of a clearer sense of spiritual values we
must insistently pray, and if the world is
to be saved from an era of the Dark Ages,
sooner or later our prayer will be answered.

[ 17]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

Strictly speaking, the orders of preach-
ing friars have not been restored with us
as yet. Rome has done better there than
with the monks, the Dominicans having
not only preserved their fine tradition, but
of late acquired a new fire and fervour that
have made them a great vitalizing power.
In England the Society of the Divine Com-
passion is a genuinely Franciscan founda-
tion, and we once had here, in Father Paul,
a possible centre for a similar work. He
has now accepted Roman jurisdiction and
is finding there the support of men and the
charity denied him in his earlier days, so
all this must be done over again, perhaps
now, under the conditions of the present
debacle, with better chance of success.

The importance to us of an immediate
restoration of the two chief orders, Fran-
ciscan and Dominican, cannot be overesti-
mated. Our fat and futile social organism,
where wealth is the chief stimulus to action,
and the first consideration in political, in-
dustrial and social affairs, — the great sub-
stitution of modernism for honour, courage
and duty, — must be met by the consecrated
poverty of the Franciscan, fearlessly de-
nouncing a condition of things that, when

[ i8]

MONASTICISM AND WORLD CRISIS

civilization returns again, will be bracketed
in later histories with the epochs in the
Dark Ages and during the Renaissance
when simony had rotted the Church and
society to a point wherefrom recovery was
possible only by the direct intervention of
God. In our economic-industrial state we
are confronted by a steady progress away
from the free association of the Middle
Ages, back to the '' Servile State " of an-
tiquity, with the certainty that before this is
accomplished there will be war that is
overt, bloody and relentless. If we are to
escape this I believe it can only be through
the intervention of the poor brothers of
St. Francis, glorifying poverty, love and
labour over and above the principles that
are now the guiding stars of our decline.

And what of the Dominicans? Surely,
if ever, we need now their fearless and in-
sistent defence of Catholic truth. It is a
custom to call ourselves a Christian nation,
just as before the war we spoke of the
'^Christian civilization" of Europe. It is
also customary for some of us to speak of
the Episcopal Church as a Catholic Church.
If we speak from a lively faith our convic-
tions do us honour, as must all faith that

[ 19]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

relies on an inner conviction, not on ap-
parent facts. In any case we are compelled
to admit that less than half the people, of
America even, call themselves Christians of
one sort or another, and that there is enough
unblushing heresy high in honour within
the Anglican Church to bring it to ship-
wreck unless it meets with vigorous coun-
teraction. Neither St. Athanasius nor St.
Dominic nor St. Ignatius Loyola ever con-
fronted bolder and more insidious unfaith
and disloyalty. Just because more and more
Presbyterians build Gothic churches, with
stained-glass windows and twenty thousand
dollar organs, and an increasing number of
our clergy wear Eucharistic vestments and
put two candles (frequently unlighted) on
their altars, we think that all is well.

Strong defence of the Catholic Faith and
nothing but the Catholic Faith, asserted
openly, everywhere and insistently, is a
crying need of our time, and without this
every effort at a redemption of society will
fail, unless we are willing to count alone
on the " uncovenanted mercies of God."
There will be no new and better day for
the world unless underneath and inter-
penetrating present life and the social

[ 20]

MONASTICISM AND WORLD CRISIS

fabric is the definite, dogmatic, and sac-
ramental religion that has made and
preserved the Catholic Church and
Christian society from the day of Pente-
cost. Give us once more the Order of
Preachers of St. Dominic, bound under
the threefold rule, with no parochial obli-
gations, but going far and wide, in poverty
and in the willingness for martyrdom if
necessary, and we shall not have to ask so
much of some of our bishops and our parish
clergy who already are crushed under the
weight of their special duties.

The third class, that of the canons-regu-
lar, really comprises the greater part of our
Religious Orders today, at the head stand-
ing the Society of St. John the Evangelist.
Mission priests they truly are, and this func-
tion is equal in importance with the others
I have named. I say less- of them now, for
we know them better, and no word is neces-
sary to justify them or to add to the demand
that their numbers should be increased.
I think, however, there is a very real de-
mand that out of them should grow, and
immediately, something more closely re-
sembling the canons-regular of St. Augus-
tine or those of St. Norbert. There should

[21 ]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

be, under every bishop, a kind of diocesan
monastery, self-governing and self-con-
tained, but subject to the call of the bishop
for such service as he might demand, such
as evangelical work in heathen districts,
temporary charge of missions, emergency
service in parishes, and the maintenance of
church services and parish work where a
certain minimum stipend could not be
raised. Such houses of canons should re-
ceive young priests immediately after or-
dination, giving them work '' under service
conditions," on three-year and renewable
vows, and also superannuated clergy who
would form a nucleus of permanency. If
possible young men should be trained here
for the priesthood, and small schools of
orphan boys might be maintained. Within
its precincts the house would be self-govern-
ing, with the bishop as visitor; but when a
man was called out for active service, he
would become the bishop's man, owing for
the time obedience to him alone. Of course,
there would be some arrangement whereby
a certain number of men would always be
left in the house for the conduct of its serv-
ices and internal affairs, while no man
should be compelled to absent himself ex-

[22]

MONASTICISM AND WORLD CRISIS

cept for a definite number of days at a time,
during which period the bishop would be
responsible for his maintenance. Every
bishop would welcome such an engine of
service as these diocesan monasteries would
prove, and they seem the easiest of accom-
plishment, since normally their vows would
be for short periods, and a clear vocation to
the Religious Life — the hardest thing to
find or to be sure of — would be less neces-
sary than in the case of monks and friars.
In a way each house of this kind would be
a place for the discovering and testing of
vocations, and while many would return to
the secular priesthood, others would pro-
ceed to the contemplative or the active life
of the Benedictine or Dominican or Fran-
ciscan rules.

Of these three definite systems, one must
then immediately be widely strengthened
and extended, the other two re-created. In
the beginning the Benedictine, Franciscan,
and Dominican rules should be accepted
practically in their integrity. Experience
will indicate necessary changes of adapta-
tion, but there is none now who seems to
possess that clear vision that would make
possible either a new rule or the series of

[23 ]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

modifications of an old one that would per-
fectly meet the anomalous conditions of our
time. Moreover there is in monasticism
something akin to the Apostolical Succes-
sion which alone guarantees a valid priest-
hood, and this identity of motive and conti-
nuity of tradition must be preserved. Every
Religious since the sixth century has traced
his lineage and his "mission" back to St.
Benedict, and so it must always be.
Gathered together under his patronage,
and that of his successors, clear direction
will be given as to the lines along which the
necessary modification must proceed.

One may admit, and frankly, that the
obstacles that stand in the way of this res-
toration and revival seem almost insuper-
able. They are not this, but only stimulating
to a degree. Hitherto, when the need arose,
some one man came forward, out of ob-
livion, to stir the world and gather together
the necessary soldiers in God's new army.
St Benedict, St. Berno, St. Robert of
Molesmes, St. Stephen Harding, Chrode-
gang of Metz, St. Bernard, St. Bruno, St.
Francis, St. Dominic, St. Ignatius Loyola,
all were sudden and shining lights, vivid
and dominant personalities filled with the

[24]

MONASTICISM AND WORLD CRISIS

Spirit of God, who had the vision, the
power to interpret it, and the faculty of
inspiring and leading men; and the same is
true down even to our own day, in the per-
sons of Father Benson, and Dom Aelred Car-
lyle, and Father Huntington. Under them
the task was easy of accomplishment, but
now we confront a new situation where there
are no precedents to guide us. The War is a
great wonder and prolific of many revela-
tions, but none is more staggering than this :
that now, at a moment when the world cries
aloud for leadership as never before, there
is none to answer. In no land, among no
people, in no category of life, is there to be
found today one leader of the first class;
not a statesman, not a philosopher, hardly
even a soldier, and with the exception of
the Cardinal of Malines and certain of the
French bishops, not a Churchman of the
first class, to see, to interpret, to arouse or
to lead. In these latter days modernism —
largely through its basic principles of
Protestantism, secularism and democracy —
has reduced all men to a dead level of in-
feriority, from which no heroic leader lifts
his head.

In some way, then, we must find a sub-

[25 ]'

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

stitute for the great creators of Christian
monasticism, since modern civilization has
reached a point where leaders are no longer
produced. The dangers that follow from
this lack of leadership are deep-seated and
sinister. Father Benson used to say that he
had known few men with a vocation to be
monks, but many with a vocation to be
Fathers Superior. The danger of mistaken
leadership, or of joint action without leader-
ship, are very great. It takes several years
to test a vocation, and many years to make a
monk. Obedience is even a harder rule to
follow than either poverty or chastity, and
training is as necessary for a monk or friar
as for an engineer or a physician. I see no
alternative but for the tested Orders we
have, such as the S. S. J. E. and Holy Cross,
largely to abandon their other work in
order that they may receive into their no-
vitiates the men who may be drawn towards
the Religious Life, to test and train them
even for other houses and other possible
Rules than their own. Could they do this,
could they make this sacrifice, they might
become the nurseries of a complete and
saving system of monasticism. Another
possibility would be the organization of the

[26]

MONASTICISM AND WORLD CRISIS

diocesan monasteries of canons-regular
of which I have spoken, the prior in each
case being at first novice-master as w^ell, and
a trained Religious loaned for a fev^ years
for this particular work. One warning can-
not be too often reiterated, which is that the
certain road to failure lies through a group
of earnest and zealous men banding to-
gether to form a religious community, with-
out disciplinary experience, and intent only
on creating a centre of monastic life out of
their own inner consciousness. We have
had rather too much of this of late, and the
experiment must not be repeated.

So, then, we must begin by strengthening
the S. S.J.E. and Holy Cross and at the
same time restoring true monasticism
through a revived Benedictinism, and the
orders of Franciscan and Dominican
preaching friars. I am increasingly con-
vinced that the work will not and must not
stop here. The old rules must be amended
and developed for new orders, but the time
has come for a further extension of the
monastic idea. In the beginning, in the time
of Pachomius and the hermits of the desert,
the unit was the individual, wholly with-
drawn from the world and isolated in his

[ 27]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

mountain cave, or on the top of his column
if his taste led in that direction. St. Bene-
dict increased this unit through exalting the
idea of human fellowship, and thereafter it
consisted of groups, either of men or women,
forming a centralized community. Then
St Ignatius Loyola increased the size of
these groups, giving them the centralized
control of an army. Now the time has come
for a further extension of the great idea, not
to the exclusion of the monastic unit or of
the individual unit, but to supplement
them. This new unit will be the family,
men, women and children, in that most holy
unit of all which is the Christian family,
gathering together in places withdrawn
from the world ( as the world is now, and has
been for nearly five centuries), where they
can build up what I like to call '^ walled
towns," — no more of the world than is the
monastery, but like that constituted on lines
of order, simplicity and righteousness.
The headlong development of modernism
has at last resulted in a social organism
which is identical in all parts of the world
and apparently invincible and irreformable
— at all events of its own motion or from
within. In the current effort of one section

[ 28 ]

MONASTICISM AND WORLD CRISIS

of this organism to establish by force and
the denial of the last traces of an earlier
Christian society its hegemony of the globe,
the whole thing may be destroyed, as com-
pletely as Antiquity was destroyed, and be-
fore the end of the century we may be ek-
ing out a precarious and savage existence
amid the crumbling ruins of a proud civil-
ization that has passed away. The chances
are that this is the fate in store for the
world, which is very given to '^ vain repeti-
tions"; but if for the moment this catastro-
phe is delayed, as Rome sporadically re-
vived in a measure, and with failing vigour,
between the successive barbarian invasions,
then the immediate question will be, What
course are they to pursue who have read the
writing on the wall and have seen the pres-
ent phantasm of culture only as a silly
mockery, incapable of self -regeneration? If
after this war there is an interlude of com-
placent recovery in preparation for the next
and more devastating visitation; if some
imbecile return is made towards the status
quo ante, with secularism rampant in edu-
cation and Dr. Flexner perhaps '' Dictator
of Studies " ; with the present smug and cyni-
cal substitute for democracy rampant and

[29]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

unashamed; with raw heresy masquerading
under the name of '' fraternal co-operation "
and "glorious comprehensiveness"; with
industrialism working again towards the
final establishment of the Servile State;
with a pseudo-evolutionary pseudo-philoso-
phy salving the surface wounds of a van-
ishing conscience and feeding vanity with
the pabulum of fatuous flattery; with public
opinion and newspapers and automobiles
and victrolas and airplanes and movies and
" great white ways," and billionaires and
war babies and pacifism and social-service
crusades and world conferences on unfaith
and disorder, — together with all the myr-
iad other engaging manifestations of the
era of enlightenment that succeeded the
Christian Commonwealth of the Middle
Ages — what are we to do?

Frankly, I think there is nothing but a
raising of the cry "To your tents, O Israel!"
and a retreat to the walled towns, that will
be the new sanctuaries of those who are too
proud to bend the knee to Baal: to volun-
tary " concentration camps," each of which
would be a little imperium in imperio,
an oasis of self-restraint in a desert of self-
indulgence, where once more religion be-

[30]

MONASTICISM AND WORLD CRISIS

comes something besides a social amenity
and interpenetrates all life until again the
bad division between Church and State is
altogether lost. It is only in such communi-
ties that the human scale can be regained,
and until this replaces the imperialism that
now dominates all action and all thought,
it is useless to talk about civilization as a
thing which has any contemporary exist-
ence. Of course, each walled town would
contain its twin kernel of life in the shape
of a parish church and a monastery, the
latter term covering houses both for men
and women; therefore, even with this ex-
tension of the monastic idea, we shall need
our cloisters of the olden type, and even
more than otherwise. Of course, few of us
have or will have the vocation to the Re-
ligious Life, and we shall need to preserve
and restore the old and holy institution of
the family. Therefore, if we are to be
driven out, not into, but from, the wilder-
ness man has made with his clever hands
and cleverer brain, we must have our walled
towns; but these can assemble better around
the walls of some religious house than they
can be created by fiat, while itself must be
always the centre of spiritual energy and

[31]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

the final refuge of those who have become
weary of living even in the paradisaical
peace of a walled town.

From every point of view the restoration
and expansion of the consecrated Religious
Life is the demand most clamorous today.
Not that it may supersede the secular priest-
hood, but supplement and strengthen it; not
that it may hold up an ideal of asceticism in
place of that forever consecrated by the
Holy Family of Nazareth, but by its own
voluntary self-sacrifice, make the human
family more secure in its place; not that it
may destroy but that it may fulfil.

Five centuries ago, and a thousand, and
fifteen hundred, and two thousand, the
world in its periodical agony called aloud
for aid, and men put all behind them and
answered, in conformity with the will of
our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Who
first, for the saving of the world, voluntarily
established for Himself and for those who
would follow Him, the threefold vows
of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience and
added for full measure. Brotherhood and
Work. Again the same call goes forth,
and now, or later, the same answer must
be made and will be made. If to any

[32I

MONASTICISM AND WORLD CRISIS

of you the call has ever come, '' Sell that
thou hast; take up thy cross and follow Me,"
he must make sure of two things: first, that
the call is indeed of God ; and second, that
even at the price of life itself, it does not
go unheeded.

[33 ]

SACRAMENTALISM AND
THE FUTURE

SACRAMENTALISM is the Divine law of
life and therefore it is the essential
element, of the very esse of Catholic
faith and Catholic philosophy, securing
them in absolute isolation from all ethnic
religions and the many inventions of man-
made philosophies.

Here is the definition of a sacrament by
the greatest expositor of sacramental phi-
losophy, Hugh of St. Victor: '^The sacra-
ment is the corporal or material element
set out sensibly, representing from its simili-
tude, signifying from its institution, and
containing from its sanctification, some
invisible and spiritual grace." Then the
greatest pure intellect, St. Thomas Aquinas,
proceeds, in speaking of the Holy Sacra-
ment of the Altar: ''AH the other sacra-
ments seem to be ordained to this one as
to their end, for it is manifest that the
sacrament of Order is ordained to the con-
secration of the Eucharist; and the sacra-

[34]

SACRAMENTALISM AND THE FUTURE

ment of Baptism to the reception of the
Eucharist; while a man is perfected by
Confirmation so as not to fear to. abstain
from this sacrament. By Penance and Ex-
treme Unction, man is prepared to receive
the Body of Christ worthily, and Matri-
mony, at least in its signification, touches
this sacrament; in so far as it signifies the
union of Christ and the Church, of which
union the Eucharist is a figure."

As, from the creation of the world, it has
been a world of sacraments, so, from Pen-
tecost, the Church has worked in and by
the Seven Sacraments; it would be almost
possible to say that the Church has existed
for its sacraments, since these are the means
ordained by God for particularizing the
Redemption of Calvary in the person of
every man, reconciling to Himself each
who will and redeeming him from that
slavery to matter in which he was bound
through his inheritance. There is no
Church without the sacraments. The apos-
tolic ministry itself is ordered and per-
petuated simply as the means of preserving
the validity of the sacraments of Penance
and of the Body and Blood of Christ, and
as St. Thomas has said, even Penance is a

[35 ]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

means towards the Holy Sacrament of the
Altar which is '' the end and aim of all the
sacraments,"

I conceive that the time has come for us
to take thought of the bearing of this on the
question of our relationship to those, out-
side the communion of the Catholic Church,
who deny the sacraments as such, accepting
conditionally two of them only, and these
simply as symbols or commemorative cere-
monies. I conceive, also, that this scrutiny
should extend to more intimate circles of
affiliation. The famous Lambeth "Quadri-
lateral" is fatally weak in that it imposes
the fact of the Apostolic Ministry without
reference to its significance and its reason
for being. What excuse has it except that
it ensures the making of priests who can
administer the sacrament of Penance, act as
the agencies for the performing of the
Divine miracle in Holy Mass; offer the
very Body and Blood of Christ a Sacrifice
before God, and to these ends ensure the
unbroken continuance of a Catholic priest-
hood until the end of time.

Acceptance of the threefold ministry,
and of the fact of Apostolic succession
through the laying on of hands on the part

[ 36]

SACRAMENTALISM AND THE FUTURE

of those who claim this tactual succession,
if it did not carry with it a true acceptance
of the Catholic doctrine of the nature, and
efficacy, and mode of operation of the
Seven Sacraments, would be but a still fur-
ther extension of heresy closely approach-
ing sacrilege. What we who are Catholics
want and work for and pray for is unity in
faith and belief even if there is some diver-
sity in practice. We have come to the
parting of the ways and can no longer
follow a path that has led to substantial
unity of practice with unlimited diversity
in belief.

It is for this reason that we can take no
further interest in an empty conformity;
that the "glorious comprehensiveness" of
last-century apologetic leaves us cold, and
that at last we are coming to consider
whether it is possible for any portion of the
Church to remain longer half Protestant
and half Catholic, mingled indifferently of
those who accept and those who deny the
Catholic doctrine of the sacraments. It is
here that the line of demarcation exists ; not
between those who maintain the form of the
threefold ministry and those who prefer
the congregational polity; not between the

[37]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

adherents of a more or less historical liturgy
and those who take unto themselves many
inventions of curious and novel ritual; not
between the Protestant Episcopalian and
the Protestant Congregationalist whatever
his sect and name, but between those who,
on the one hand, accept the dogma and
philosophy of sacramentalism, with the
Seven Sacraments in their entirety, and
the supreme sacrament of Holy Mass as
the crown and consummation of all ; and, on
the other hand, those who reject the sacra-
ment of Penance, turn the sacrament of
Matrimony into a civil contract, ignore the
sacraments of Confirmation and Unction,
and recognize in the Sacrament of the Altar
neither Sacrifice nor Real Presence, but
only a symbolical commemoration of a fait
accompli.

The division lies here and it is impassi-
ble. On the one hand lies Protestantism,
on the other, Catholicism, and the two can
never mix. On the one hand is that vast
body of men in communion with the Apos-
tolic See of Rome, the heterogeneous, if
not heterodox, units of the fast crumbling
Eastern Church, and — ourselves. On the
other, all the one hundred and fifty-seven

[38]

SACRAMENTALISM AND THE FUTURE

varieties of sects, together with a probable
majority of the bishops, clergy and people
of the Anglican and the Protestant Epis-
copal Churches. The line of cleavage lies
here and not elsewhere, and nothing is
gained by a denial of the fact.

It is not along this line, however, that I
wish to speak; the place of the sacraments
in Catholic Christianity, their essential
nature, the supreme significance of the
Sacrament of the Altar and its unique
value devotionally, are all, for us, matters
of common knowledge and need no argu-
ment. That, as St. Thomas says, '' this
sacrament is the end and consummation of
all the sacraments," we know, but I do
not think we sufficiently realize that
behind lies a great, a complete system of
philosophy, developed by, or revealed
through, supreme exponents of Christian
thought; a philosophy that underlies all the
great Christian centuries, explaining their
achievements, revealing their quality, mak-
ing manifest their singularity in human life.
A philosophy that is also a sufficient ex-
position of the universe, and that has been
rejected through the last five-century epoch
of modernism in favour of a materialistic

[39]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

system called Evolution, with the result we
see before us in the progressive collapse,
in horror, in ignominy and dishonour, of
what we have called modern civilization.
In an absolutely real sense it is possible to
say that the rejection of sacramentalism
and of the Catholic sacraments, in philoso-
phy and religion, is the root cause of the
war. And the corollary follows close upon ;
that is to say, it is only through the abandon-
ment of evolutionary philosophy and a re-
turn, in spirit and in act, to an explicit and
inclusive sacramentalism, that we can look
for the energizing force that will enable
us to build up a new world on the wide
ruins of a great failure.

I would not minimize the great work we
have to do in bringing Ecclesia Anglicana
to recognize, accept and avow Holy Mass
as the central, supreme and unique Opus
Dei in her visible life and action; this can-
not be too strongly emphasized, nor the
equal duty in bringing again explicit rec-
ognition of the Mass as Sacrifice as well as
Communion. The two things where effort
should now be centred are, I believe, the
establishing of Reservation as the standard
practice in all churches, and the preaching

[ 40 ]

SACRAMENTALISM AND THE FUTURE

of the Sacrifice of the Mass. Reservation
by Episcopal tolerance, either as the result
of good nature, indifference, or the working
of ''the principle of comprehensiveness," is
unworthy and hardly to be tolerated except
faute de mieux. I am not sure that the en-
forcing of the doctrine of the Eucharistic
Sacrifice is not more important. Both work
towards establishing the Real Presence of
Christ in the Sacrament, and this is funda-
mental both from the standpoint of religion
and of philosophy. St. Augustine has said :
'' Christ was sacrificed once in Himself,
and yet He is sacrificed daily in the Sacra-
ment," and St. Thomas, with that splendid
lucidity that makes him '' Doctor Angeli-
cus," ''This Sacrament is both a sacrifice
and a sacrament; it has the nature of a sac-
rifice inasmuch as it is offered up, and it
has the nature of a sacrament inasmuch as
it is received. And therefore it has the
effect of a sacrament in the recipient and
the effect of a sacrifice in the offerer, or in
them for whom it is offered."

Sacrament and Sacrifice, the two great
realities the world had cast away during
that era that is now commg to its unhonoured
end through such a cataclysm as has not

[41 ]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

happened since the fall of Rome. Through
the Great Purgation of War and the univer-
sal testing of souls, the reality of sacrifice
is coming back to a world that thought it
could do without, but the reality of sacra-
mentalism is still far from the minds of
men. Still the world is enmeshed in the
tangled web of a false philosophy; deep in
the morass of dull materialism it struggles
vainly, led to its betrayal by the ignis fatuus
of an iridescent intellectualism. From
this nemesis it must be saved if a new Dark
Ages is to be avoided.

Let me quote again from Hugh of St.
Victor, a great philosopher of the twelfth
century, one who is little known but who is,
I think, not only the perfect expositor of
sacramentalism, but as great a philosopher
under Christianity as Plato under paganism :

'' There was a certain wisdom that seemed
such to them that knew not the true wisdom.
The world found it and began to be puffed
up, thinking itself great in this. Confid-
ing in its wisdom it became presumptu-
ous and boasted it would attain the highest
wisdom. And it made itself a ladder of
the face of creation. . . . Then those things
which were seen were known, and there

[42 ]

SACRAMENTALISM AND THE FUTURE

were other things which were not known;
and through those which were manifest
they expected to reach those that were
hidden. And they stumbled and fell into
the falsehoods of their own imagining.
... So God made foolish the wisdom of
this world; and He pointed out another
wisdom, which seemed foolishness and was
not. For it preached Christ crucified, in
order that truth might be sought in hu-
mility. But the world despised it, wishing
to contemplate the works of God, which He
had made a source of wonder, and it did
not wish to venerate what He had set for
imitation, neither did it look to its own
disease, seeking medicine in piety; but pre-
suming on a false health, it gave itself over
with vain curiosity to the study of alien
things."

I know not if there is anywhere a better
description than this, of our own world of
modernism that reached the summit of its
ascending curve in the first decade of the
present century. For four hundred years it
had been progressively abandoning that
sacramental idea that progressively had
grown during the fifteen antecedent cen-
turies under that constant and cumulative

[43 I

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

revelation that was promised and given to
the Catholic Church. So in the end the
world ^'stumbled and fell into the falsehoods
of its own imagining," until '' God made
foolish the wisdom of this world " by per-
mitting it to develop its logical conclusion
in world war and irremediable ruin.

Any future of decency and righteousness
must be based on a renunciation of '^ the
wisdom of this world," which is material-
ism substantiated by the heresy of Evolu-
tion; so much of the Church as has adhered
to sacramentalism, or recovered it after the
episode of the Reformation, holds in its
hands the keys to this future, and it will be
largely, if not primarily, through the rein-
forcement of sacramentalism that the future
may be assured. For us then, and for all
Catholics, devotion to the Holy Sacrament
of the Altar opens out into something far
more than doctrine and worship; into the
very philosophy and way of thought and
mode of life that must condition society
after the war.

We hear much of a new knowledge of
Mediaevalism and of a Mediaeval revival.
This is far more than a question of archi-
tectural style, more than an escape from

[44 I

SACRAiMENTALISM AND THE FUTURE

contemporary imperialism into the free
democracy of the Middle Ages, more than
a restoration of the Mediaeval industrial
system. It is in efifect a return to the re-
ligion and the philosophy of the Catholic
ages which made possible Gothic art and
the guild system and the social unit of
human scale.

The world is ready for the great return.
In four years war has shattered the whole
brummagem fabric of modernism. In-
dustrial civilization, imperial nationalism,
industry and finance, the intellectual cri-
terion, automatic evolution, the omnipo-
tence of education and environment, the
possibility of earthly perfectibility for man,
all have gone on the pyre of great burning,
and only the penitential ashes remain. At
the very moment when the whole world ac-
claimed triumphant modernism as victor
over the slaughtered superstitions of the
past, behold a great wonder; the casting
down into the dust of the idols of brass and
the naked showing of the clumsy feet of
clay; yea, the world is ready, and more than
ready, and the proclamation of old truth,
long forgotten, will not fall on deaf ears.

The whole world is sacramental, and the

[45]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

Seven of the Catholic Church are but the
sign and symbol of the Universe. Let me
quote again from Hugh of St. Victor.
'' God set for man as a sign the sacraments
of his salvation, in order that whosoever
would apprehend them with right faith and
firm hope might, though under the yoke,
have some fellowship with freedom. . . .
For as there is body and soul in man, and in
Scripture the letter and the sense, so in
every sacrament there is a visible external
which may be handled and the invisible
within which is believed and taught." And
finally ''The spirit was created for God's
sake; the body for the spirit's sake, and the
world for the body's sake, so that the spirit
might be subject to God, the body to the
spirit, and the world to the body."

Let us go on from this. Life as we know
it, the life of this world, is the union of
matter and spirit; and matter is not spirit,
nor spirit matter, nor is one a mode of the
other but they are two different creatures.
Severance of matter and spirit, of body and
soul, is death. That ancient heresy that
matter is a figment of fancy, is re-vamped
in these latter days for the wonder of delec-
tation of disillusioned Protestants. It is

[46]

SACRAMENTALISM AND THE FUTURE

a symbol of death. That modern heresy
ingeniously devised for the infidel and the
materialist, that spirit is only a mode of
matter automatically evolved through bio-
logical processes, is also a symbol of death,
if it is not death itself, or perhaps that awful
and mysterious thing, " the sin against the
Holy Ghost." Materialism on the one
hand, transcendentalism on the other, when
carried to their logical conclusion, are
denial of the law of life. All the world is
but the redemption and transfiguring of
matter through the interpenetration and
the indwelling of spirit. We cannot know
spirit except through the accidents of mat-
ter; we may not know matter except as it is
irradiated by spirit. Says St. Thomas,
^' Human nature is such it has to be led by
things corporeal and sensible to things
spiritual and intangible," and that con-
temporary but unconscious follower of
Aquinas, Henri Bergson, echoes him when
he says, "The intellect is characterized by
a natural inability to comprehend life"
"for — we cannot too often repeat it — in-
telligence and instinct are turned in opposite
directions, the former towards inert matter,
the latter towards life. Intelligence by

[47I

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

means of science, which is its work, will
deliver up to us more and more completely
the secret of physical operation; of life it
brings us, and moreover only claims to
bring us, a translation in terms of inertia."
'' Intuition" (a term chosen by Bergson to
express what Cardinal Newman called
" the spiritual power of assent," and not an
altogether happy one) is alone able to
afford us, through material mediumship,
some adumbration of the infinite. As this
great modern philosopher has said with
singular clarity, "On our personality, on
our liberty, on the place we occupy in the
whole of nature, on our origin, and perhaps
also on our destiny, it throws a light feeble
and vacillating, but it none the less pierces
the darkness of the night in which the in-
tellect leaves us." Seers and prophets and
the greatest of artists are indeed so closely
in touch at times with pure spirit that they
seem absolved from the necessities of or-
dinary men, receiving inspiration directly
and without the intervention of material
things, but this relationship is unconscious;
they are channels, media, for the outpour-
ing of Divine grace upon others than them-
selves. In a sense, then, they become the

[48]

SACRAMENTALISM AND THE FUTURE

material element in the sacramental union
of form and spirit. Infrequently appear
men and women who in the state of ecstacy
undeniably transcend human limitations,
becoming for the moment united to God
after a mystical fashion, but they are singu-
lar episodes well without the common lim-
itations of men. For man as man the fact
remains, that as he is compact of body and
soul in a unity only dissolved by death, so for
him there is no approach to the Absolute save
through the mediumship of material things.
During the great Christian centuries of
the Middle Ages this fact was universally
understood and accepted. As Mr. Porter
says in his recent book, " Beyond Architect-
ure," '' To the mediaeval mind reality was
but a symbol of unreality, matter but a re-
flection of the immaterial. Our earth
became only a shadow of Heaven." Yes,
but by symbolism matter became glorified ;
through its conjunction with spirit it be-
came, as does the body of man, ^' the temple
of the Holy Ghost." All the world of men
and women, flowers and forests and kindly
beasts, of changing seasons and mysterious
elemental forces, became but an antitype
of the Incarnation. Gothic art of every

[49I

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

sort is as great as it is because of this. What
were Reims once, and Soissons, before their
martyrdom, but the transfiguring of stone
and metal and wood ; dead matter delved
from the ground or hewn out of the forest,
through the labour of man exalted into
forms of absolute beauty that, because of
this loving labour had been transformed into
gifts worthy of giving back to God, and into
a mysterious creation that in the words of
Abbot Suger of St. Denis ''was neither
wholly of earth nor wholly of Heaven but
a mystical blending of both," the very rev-
elation to men of that which was beyond
their grasp but not beyond their reach —
the Beatific Vision of that absolute truth
and absolute beauty that are God in His
Heaven. It is no accident that Gothic art
and sacramental philosophy and the ex-
altation of the Blessed Sacrament synchro-
nized in these years of the Middle Ages, for
they are varied manifestations of the same
thing. It is no accident that the destruction
of Gothic art and the acceptance of a ma-
terialistic philosophy and denial of the In-
carnation have synchronized in these later
years, for here also they are varied mani-
festations of the same thing.

[so]

SACRAMENTALISM AND THE FUTURE

Out of the Renaissance came the exalta-
tion of the intellectual test and standard;
out of Protestantism the denial of the
reality of the sacraments and of sacramen-
talism. The revolutions of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries enforced the new
doctrines and spread them wide, and the in-
dustrial standards and methods of the last
century have finally separated spirit from
matter, cast it out into the limbo of ex-
ploded superstitions, and left only dead
matter for our desire and acceptance —
money, material advantage and force.

We look with disgust on the hedonistic
revels of a dying Roman Imperialism; we
turn in offence from the sordid corruption
of the last years of the Dark Ages; we hold
up to scorn and derision the gross licentious-
ness of Church and State in the Italy of the
fifteenth century; but no one of these
epochs, base as it is, records a lower fall
than the manners and methods and morals
of our own modernism when at last the
severance had been accomplished and
matter, unregenerated and unredeemed,
had become Lord of the World, material-
ism its sacrosanct religion and its law of
life.

[51 1

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

The curse of this great apostacy lay over
all the peoples that in predominant num-
bers had turned from the Catholic faith and
had abandoned sacramental philosophy: on
England, France, America, but chiefest of
all on Germany, for there the process had
begun and there it had reached its flower.
Great in the eyes of men were the results
achieved through this comprehensive apos-
tacy; wealth without limit (though con-
fined to the few) ; ingenious and amazing
machines myriad in number and endlessly
turning out more wealth; forces of nature
harnessed and made the meek bond-slaves
of men; intellectual capacity raised to new
levels of competence and capable of justify-
ing anything so long as it diverged suf-
ficiently from ancient and once honourable
standards. There was hardly a man in the
spring of 19 14 who would have denied that
modernism had gloriously triumphed, and
only a scattered few who doubted its eter-
nity. Then came the epic catastrophe when
in an hour the card-castle had crumbled
about our ears. The efficiency of material
imperialism swept back the inefficiency of
an imperialized democracy, and so it has
continued for four years. The boasted bar-

[ 52 ]

SACRAMENTALISM AND THE FUTURE

riers against war or dissolution, erected one
behind the other by finance, capitalism, a
socialistic and organized proletariat, uni-
versal education, popular government, in-
tellectual and spiritual emancipation, broke,
toppled and dissolved, forming only van-
ishing and impotent ramparts against a
triumphant Force released from all bond-
age to moral standards and spiritual laws.

What this has meant in national conduct
on the part of the thus far triumphant
power, in broken oaths and cynical lying,
in sanctioned savagery, and beastliness that
balks the most morbid imagination, I need
not rehearse; it is part of the history of all
time. We have been told that all this is the
pathological phenomenon of a small clan
of aristocratic rulers, and that the people
themselves, the good, kind, Teutonic peas-
ants and workmen, have no part therein,
and must be coddled and humoured so that
they may be encouraged to cast ofiF the alien
and official incubus under which they
groan in heavy bondage. We are told, but
we do not believe ; for during the last three
years the revelations of popular character
have been convincing, and we know that
what we are fighting is a supreme autoc-

[53 ]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

racy, and more : it is a homogeneous group
of peoples, and more: it is a motive and a
force let loose in the world that reaches its
tentacles out into all nations, and that must
be destroyed, root and branch, if society is to
survive, and such civilization as we have
be not cut off by a new Dark Ages. What
it is they mean, among the people them-
selves, is well set forth in a very recent Ger-
man newspaper, where it is said (but not
for foreign consumption) : '' Fraud, em-
bezzlement, peculation, deceit, immorality,
lust, these unhappily are the characteris-
tics of German domestic life of the present
day. . . . Our returning victorious warriors
will be confronted with a terrible disillu-
sionment, and our children will look back
on these years as a time of rampant barbar-
ism, of unchecked criminality and utter
absence of morals."

It is to this that the new philosophy
and the non-religion of the post-mediaeval
epoch have led us; to the war that scourges
the whole world, to a break-down of moral
sense and of right standards that make such
a war, its antecedents and its concomitants,
a possibility. There are many streams of
tendency threading the last four centuries

[S4l

SACRAMENTALISM AND THE FUTURE

that have brought this about, but we can
no longer escape the conviction that it
is through Protestantism, and especially
through the Protestant denial of Catholic
sacramentalism, that the strongest element
finds its course.

This is inevitably the case. Through
sacramentalism wq see the sanctity of ma-
terial things through their function as a
vehicle of the spirit, as through the Incar-
nation we realize the sanctity of the human
body that is its dwelling-place. There is
nothing so mean that it may not take on
glory through the power of the Holy Ghost,
nothing that cannot serve as a channel of
Divinity. Through sacramentalism we un-
derstand how all this finality we call the
Absolute shines to us in symbol through
all created things, so that only by their
mediation may we lay hold on the mystical
vision of God. Of all this the world, as
such, has known nothing during the last
century. Material things have been this
and no more: dead lumps and clods, from
the gold that has become the one desire of
man, to the human body bought and sold and
outraged as utterly as under black African
slavery. The spiritual ideal that is the life

[55 ]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

of man, isolated from its material symbol,
has ceased to manifest itself, and is there-
fore denied save as a by-product of biologi-
cal processes. Even the pledged word, in
itself a just symbol, even a '' sacramental,"
has been degraded, and by intellectual proc-
esses untouched by the fire of spiritual per-
ception, has been proved no more than the
evanescent formula of a discredited epoch.

There are two alternatives, sacramental-
ism or materialism. In the great civiliza-
tion of the Middle Ages, as this had its
flowering and in a sense its sacramental ex-
pression in Reims Cathedral and Soissons,
we may see what the one leads to; in the
bestial destruction of Reims and Soissons —
an act symbolical in itself — we see the
significant issue of the other.

It would be an interesting task to take
up one by one the seven sacraments of
Catholicism and show how each has, be-
yond its own special power, a great signifi-
cance for us at this black and portentous
moment of the world, but this would mean
not an essay but a volume. Each one of us
can, however, make his own application
of each sacramental verity — Baptism,
Confirmation. Penance, Orders, Matri-

[56]

SACRAMENTALISM AND THE FUTURE

mony, Unction, and the Holy Eucharist.
Poignantly and perfectly each expresses
some vital truth, but of them all the last,
the crown and consummation of all the sac-
raments and of all sacramentalism, has the
most sublime significance. Think for a
moment of this great mystery: the bread
and wine of man's natural food transform_ed
in a moment by the power of God and at
the hands of His priest into the very Body
and Blood of the Saviour of the World, to
be at the same time the spiritual food of
man and the everlasting Sacrifice for the
sins of the whole world. The faith that
accepts this, even though it were universal,
might not abolish sin or avert war, for man
is man always and works after his own kind.
It would prevent such a war as this, and
such civilization as that out of which the
war came, for out of sacramental faith and
practice came honour, and truth and
sacrifice.

And through the war they are coming
back. The perfidy and dishonour of the
universal enemy rebuild in the desperate
crusaders of the new age, honour and stead-
fastness and righteous hate. Out of the
broken oaths and the cynical duplicity and

[57]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

cold and Machiavellian craft of Teuton-
ism comes a new sense of truth and justice
for those who are aligned against it. Into
a world of hedonism and self-indulgence
and gross individualism the meaning of
sacrifice returns in the thunders of unex-
ampled war, and men, women, children,
in the trenches, on the high seas, at home,
in garden and workshop, find in the su-
preme sacrifice that is theirs to offer, the
revelation of their own souls.

The world must be made over anew, in
every big and every little thing; made over
politically, socially, industrially, economi-
cally, educationally; but these reforms,
drastic as they must be, well-intentioned as
they may be, will prove only mechanistic
and disappointing devices, doomed to follow
in the long sequence of nineteenth-century
nostrums and panaceas, unless the great
fundamental reform is achieved in the
spirit, impulse and vision of all the peoples
of the world, the gaining back of the char-
acter-quality that can make success to come
out of indifferent means, and assure to
wise measures their full fruition: and this
lies in the sphere of what we call religion
and philosophy.

[ 58]

SACRAMENTALISM AND THE FUTURE

We may honestly strive to '' make the
world safe for democracy," to guarantee
the self-determination of all peoples, to
shake off from the throat of human society
the clutching fangs of imperial finance and
Jewish internationalism, to destroy the five-
century-long antithesis between capital and
labour; we may strive even to restore in all
things the unit of human scale — and our
labours will go for little unless we can gain
again the unity of the Catholic Faith and
the dynamic force of sacramental, which
is to say Christian, philosophy.

It is no exaggeration to say that the future
of the world lies with those who unite in un-
flinching devotion to the Blessed Sacrament
as verily and indeed the Communion of
the true Body and Blood of Christ, and as
well the eternal Sacrifice offered of God to
God for the sins of the world, and equally
for the quick and the dead. It is not only as
a solemn and supreme method of devotion,
it is not merely as the central, unique and
essential act of worship no other device of
clever ingenuity can supplant, that we work
and pray for the restoration of Holy Mass
to its Divinely ordained position; it is be-
cause it is the crux and the key to all that

[59]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

follows after, all that the world has aban-
doned to its grievous peril, and that must
be restored if it is to continue. Reunion
and unity centre around this, and not in
" World Conferences on Faith and Order,"
''Lambeth Quadrilaterals," or half-hearted
schemes of compromise and approximation.
'' It is the Mass that matters," and this once
won the rest is easy. And this is true of
fields far beyond that of religion itself. I
repeat, in the end the whole solution of the
world-crisis lies here, and if by a miracle
the whole world were to wake up and find
itself Catholic in the sense in which it was
Catholic from the year 975 to the year 1305,
the future would hold for us clear assur-
ance of the quick evanishment of our
crowding problems and the swift achieve-
ment of a new era of righteous life. The
miracle may be wrought, for miracles are
now the only things on which we can
rationally count with reasonable assur-
ance; but we cannot act on that assumption,
and therefore we are bound to labour
consistently, if desperately, for bringing
about the acceptable change by human
means.

In so fighting it is, I think, necessary

[60]

SACRAMENTALISM AND THE FUTURE

that we should now make an act of renun-
ciation of our fear of words, for it is fear
of words rather than of things that has left
us weak and has paralysed our efforts. The
two words we have most feared are Mass
and Sacrifice. Let us fear them no longer,
but use them frankly as avowing our honest
faith. Let us use the word Mass because
it is a symbol of that unity in the communion
of the Apostolic See towards which we
must look as the end of all projects of re-
union. Because it means not only Com-
munion but also Sacrifice, and therefore
expresses the dual nature of this sacrament.
Because it definitely excludes the interpre-
tation of this sacrament, as no more than
a symbolical commemoration, that is in-
tolerable to the Catholic Faith. Let us
frankly avow our adherence to the historic
doctrine of the sacrificial nature of this
sacrament, since without this there is no
unmutilated Catholicity resting on the un-
broken tradition and belief of the Catholic
Church.

Both the great realities that are signified
by these two words have their close ap-
plication to the present world crisis. Holy
Communion and Holy Sacrifice both lie

[6i 1

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

closer to the sickness that has overwhelmed
society than we ourselves are disposed to
think, while for the great majority of men
any hint of association is preposterous.

Materialism cannot remain the law of
life, the lodestar of human endeavour; it
cannot even exist in a world where all ma-
terial things are seen to be only evanescent
phenomena, where matter itself is recog-
nized not only as the vehicle of the spirit
and a means towards the achieving of
spiritual vision, but also as impermanent
world-stuff out of which, by essential
transformation, something else is made,
that thing for the achieving of which life,
as we know life on this earth, exists. How
thin, futile, inconsiderable, in the light
of this vision, seem all those material
ends and those material methods which
for so many generations have been the
base ideals of men. The sinister politics
and oblique diplomacy, the delusive phi-
losophies of evolutionists and pragmatists,
the subterranean machinations of high
finance and ''big business," the gross op-
portunism of social systems, the ignoble
warfare of industrial civilization, all show

[ 62 ]

SACRAMENTALISM AND THE FUTURE

hollow and valueless in the light of spirit-
ual revelation as this comes brokenly to us
through the red tempest of war. Sooner
or later, whether through victory or defeat
(it is inevitable whatever the issue; the dif-
ference lies only in time), we shall confront
the giant task of rebuilding a world. Let
us see that our foundations are secure, for
without them, deep-laid and firmly fixed,
no superstructure of human ingenuity will
stand for a generation.

Greater than the deliberations of Peace
Conferences with their paper treaties,
greater than new constitutions and novel
frontiers, greater than political and indus-
trial and social devices sprung from the
fertile brains of ingenious artificers, will
be the determinations of religion and phi-
losophy. Thus far, since the battle cry of
Armageddon sounded on those last days
of July, 1 9 14, neither has played a prom-
inent or even a creditable part. From the
Cardinal of Malines to the priest soldiers
in the trenches and the chaplains of many
faiths, there are endless instances of indi-
vidual nobility and heroism, and the list of
martyrs and confessors increases daily. For
the Church itself, whether Roman, An-

[63 ]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

glican, or Eastern, very little can be said;
and less is said. The ominous fact is that
it was and is a negligible factor. The same
is true of the Protestant sects in their cor-
porate capacity, whether they are the obe-
dient sycophants of German autocracy
or the free associations of England and
America. Organized religion, Catholic
and Protestant, has not only failed to meet
the crisis in any measurable degree, or to
adapt itself to the enormous agony of un-
counted millions, it has sunk out of sight
so far as world-forces are concerned, and
its word, if uttered, would now go unheard.
In the greatest cataclysm since the fall of
Rome the Church has ceased to function
as an operative, public force.

So with philosophy. In Germany the
men once so inordinately famous (I know
not why) just before the war, the Euckens
and their kind, have become the apologists
of dishonour. The greatest figure in France,
Bergson, is silent before a crisis he cannot
meet, and among English-speaking people
we have only a Father Figgis or a Chester-
ton to fight through the blind chaos in the
desperate endeavour to find some signs of a
philosophy of life that may clear the way

[64]

SACRAMENTALISM AND THE FUTURE

for that which is to come. Not alone were
we unprepared in a political, industrial, eco-
nomic and military sense to meet the assault
of a conscienceless and efficient enemy, our
unpreparedness extended equally to the cate-
gories of philosophy and religion, and we
suffer, and may in the end fail, quite as
much on account of one as of the
other.

Thus far we have failed, but we can al-
ways look to the future, and it is never too
late for amendment, even for the winning
of salvation. I cannot presume to speak
for the Church of Rome, whose defects
and delinquencies are other than our own.
I do not propose to speak for Protestantism,
which must act in accordance with its own
principles, which are so different from
those of Catholicism that no common
ground appears. For ourselves, members
of the Anglican Church, I see the need
of new and radically different action along
many lines; but none is more vital, more
immediate in its necessity, more closely
connected with the vast problem of the
World after the War, than those I postu-
lated at the beginning of this essay: sac-
ramentalism as the basic philosophical

[6s ]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

system of the Church; the Seven Sacra-
ments as its fundamental mode of operation ;
Holy Mass as the central fact of its wor-
ship and its Divine strength, and the real-
ity and efficacy of the Eucharist Sacrifice.

[66]

THE PHILOSOPHICAL
NECESSITY

THEY are called wise who put things
in their right order and control them
well." So begins the first sentence
of the "Summa Contra Gentiles" of St.
Thomas Aquinas. The implied condemna-
tion of those who establish false standards of
comparative value and ill control those er-
roneously fixed, holds today as it held in the
year 1262, even though now they may be
a preponderant multitude where then they
were a minor if conspicuous faction.

''To put things in their right order and
control them well"; is not this the essence
of wisdom and the secret of righteous life?
To weigh and assort all things, estimating
the value of each in relation to all others
and to eternal truth; to exalt and pursue
the things that are great and admirable and
everlasting; to cast down and reject those
things that are insignificant and transitory
and without value. This is the substance
of wisdom, as it is the object of each man's

[67]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

living; that he may control them well, both
the great things and the small, not with
fumbling hands and by unstable minds
swayed by every wind of doctrine aroused
by Roger Bacon's vulgi sensus imperiti^hui
with the firm grasp of mastership directed
by an intrepid and reasonable mind.

This is that Wisdom that is the eternal
goal of intellectual man, and Philosophia
the way of that everlasting pilgrimage.
^' Philosophy," says the great Cardinal of
Malines, ''is the science of the totality of
things. The particular sciences are di-
rected to groups of objects more or less
restricted; philosophy, the general science,
regards the sum-total of reality." So it ap-
pears that philosophy alone enables us to
"put things in their right order" when
the accidents and illusions of life, and the
narrow outlook of the single sciences, have
confused all relations; and without a right
philosophy we are as those of whom Hugh
of St. Victor speaks who '' stumbled and
fell into the falsehoods of their own
imaginings."

But the boon of a right philosophy is not
the wages of a delving intellectuality nor
is it the laurel crown of profound erudition.

[68 ]

THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY

They that are thus furnished may attain the
highest good, as Aristotle and Sl Thomas
Aquinas, but achievement is granted also
to the humble and the unlearned ; the shep-
herd on the hills, the poet in bitter exile,
the monk in his forgotten cloister. There
is much truth in the words of Friar Bacon:
^^AU the wisdom of philosophy is created
by God and given to the philosophers, and
it is Himself that illuminates the minds of
men in all wisdom." This is necessarily
so; from Aristotle to the modern Aquinas,
Henri Bergson, every philosopher who can
justly claim the title has based his system on
the primary assumption that man, of his
own motion, cannot remotely touch the
" thing-in-itself ," the noumenon^ the Ab-
solute, but is able to deal only with the
phenomenon or, as Aristotle calls it, the
" phantasm." " In the present state of life,
in which the soul is united to a passible
body," says St. Thomas, ''it is impossible
for our intellect to understand anything
actually, except by turning to the phan-
tasm " ; and Bergson says the same when he
states as an axiom that " the mind of man
by its very nature is incapable of appre-
hending reality." Philo, the Platonist Jew,

[69]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

put it succinctly when he wrote, ''The tram-
mels of the body prevent men from know-
ing God in Himself; He is known only in
the Divine forces in which He manifests
Himself."

Yet if we would live we must be able
'' to put things in their right order," and
to know God in the sense of personal ap-
proach if not of comprehension. It is here
that the love of God shows itself in that He
does again and again reveal enough of
the everlasting wisdom and of Himself to
enable men to assure themselves that He
is, and, if they will, to turn their footsteps
in the right way.

Through the Incarnation came not only
the Redemption but also the Enlightenment,
and thereafter the order of the Universe and
the significance of life were as clear as they
may ever be without a further explicit
revelation; but ''God has never left Him-
self without a witness," and so five centuries
before the Incarnation, and since then
amongst those who knew not Christ, much
has been revealed, so that great philoso-
phers have appeared and have spoken
"with the tongues of men and angels," and
the things that we may use for our soul's

[70]

THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY

health today, when in our own time, with
all our erudition and our scientific attain-
ment and our stored-up knowledge of cen-
turies, the Divine revelation has not come,
and we have not only forgotten or rejected
the philosophy of the inspired men of the
past, but as well have taken to ourselves
those that spoke without God, makers of
false philosophies, and so have ^' fallen into
the falsehoods of our own imaginings."

In this fact lies not only the reason why
the world in spite of its material glory
dipped lower and lower towards the point
of disaster achieved in July A.D. 1914, but
the explanation of the notorious inability
of both organized religion and formal
philosophy to meet the challenge of a
world in dissolution during four years of
war, and finally the lack of a great, con-
structive, dynamic leading on, at this mo-
ment when the destinies of man are being
determined for a period of five centuries.
There is today no operative philosophy of
life; we are trifling with the shreds and
shards of the materialistic and mechanical
substitutes of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, from Descartes to Herbert Spen-
cer, from Hobbes and Kant to Nietzsche

[71 ]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

and William James, and in them there is
neither health nor safety, nor the clear
conviction, the lucid and logical organism,
the invigorating and passionate force of
the Athenians, the Fathers of the Church,
the Neo-Platonists or the mighty masters
of Mediaevalism.

The Reformation destroyed more for us
of the North and the West than the fabric
of the Catholic Church and the substance of
the Catholic Faith. The nexus between
theology and philosophy is so close that
w^hat affects one afifects the other. ^^In-
tellige lit credas; crede ut intelligas^^'^ says
St. Augustine. It is not so much that the-
ology begins vs^here philosophy leaves ofif,
and vice versa, as it is that both pursue an
actually parallel course in time, and side
by side; if one falls the other stumbles, and
unless quick recovery is effected both are
involved in a common ruin. I do not know
which stumbled first at that critical moment
when Mediaevalism yielded to the Renais-
sance. Machiavelli wrote "II Principe"
in 1 5 13, Luther posted his Theses in 15 17,
and the protagonist of the assault on Catho-
lic philosophy and ethics would thus ap-
pear to have an advantage of some four

[72]

THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY

years over the protagonist of the assault on
Catholic theology and religion. On the
other hand, while the new paganism in
philosophy does not antedate the fall of
Constantinople in 1453, the particular form
of heresy that was to rend the unity of the
Church for the latest time and plunge entire
nations in centuries of heresy and schism,
had shown itself sporadically more than a
hundred years before. The question is of
no importance; the first breakdown of
Catholic theology and Catholic philosophy
practically synchronized during the period
known as the Reformation, and wherever
the Faith was abandoned the philosophy
went with it.

Our own epoch, modernism (as one
should say Mediaevalism, or the Dark Ages
or Roman Imperialism), the five hundred
years extending from the formal end of the
Middle Ages in 1453, to 1953 — or whatever
may be the year when the next epoch is
determined for good or ill, — is that period
during which the peoples that rejected both
Catholic theology and Catholic philosophy,
or tolerated both with a thin formalism that
voided them of all power, have directed
the development of society and determined

[73 ]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

the lives of its peoples up to and including
its climacteric in the Great War. Whether
they were worth having at the price, this
new religion and this new philosophy — or
rather these, for the diversity is extreme —
does not concern me at this present. The
point I wish to make is that as those two
things, each unique in its sphere, made
possible the five centuries of Mediaeval
civilization which formed the most suc-
cessful exposition of Christianity that has
thus far been achieved, and that as their
obliteration is responsible for the civiliza-
tion (however we may estimate it) that has
now succeeded in destroying itself after
a remarkable dominion of other five cen-
turies, so the future, the foundations of
which we have now to lay, can only ap-
proach in dignity, nobility and achievement
the Christian centuries of the Middle Ages
if we are willing and able to forsake mod-
ernist religion and modernist philosophy
and return explicitly to the religion and
the philosophy of that incomparable olden
time. In a word, a sane and wholesome
and just and righteous future can be built
only on the corner-stones of Catholic re-
ligion and sacramental philosophy.

[74]

THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY

For once it is not necessary to argue over
the matter of religion; the logic of events
has dealt with that and fixed its own de-
terminations. The question of philosophy
is in a different category. We have so long
been accustomed to live without a philoso-
phy and to take refuge in archaeology^ and
^^the appeal to history" and the flimsy
scaffoldings of Teutonism or Evolutionism
or Pragmatism, we neither feel the need of
this strong defence, this vast directing
energy, nor take kindly to it when it is
offered. Yet there can be no right and
enduring religion without a right philos-
ophy, as there can be no right and endur-
ing philosophy without a right religion.
^' Philosophy is the science of the totality
of things." ''They are called wise [that
is to say, philosophers] who put things in
their right order and control them well."
" Philosophy regards the sum-total of re-
ality." The moment has come for us to see
things as a whole, to establish a new system
of comparative values, to confront not
fictions but realities. ''The integrity of
our nature is repaired by wisdom," wrote
St. Vincent of Beauvais. Reparation lies
before us, — of our nature, of society and of

[75 ]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

the world, — and to that end we must turn
to philosophy, that as ever it may fortify
the impulse of religion and by religion be
irradiated by the grace of God.

What then is this philosophy of the Mid-
dle Ages that is in itself as definitive as the
Catholic Faith? It is no ethnic or passing
intellectual by-product; it is the synthesis
of antecedent philosophies, Neo-Platonic,
Jewish, Arabian, Byzantine, Patristic,
Peripatetic, Socratic, purged of their alien
elements, gathered into an organic unity,
and vitalized by the Catholic religion. Its
greatest exponents are St. Thomas Aquinas,
Duns Scotus and Hugh of St. Victor. It
was this philosophy that, consciously or
unconsciously, formed the substance of the
wisdom of the peoples of the Middle Ages,
conditioning all their acts and all their
intellectual processes. As, with the Catho-
lic religion, it was the energizing force in
life, making possible the only consistent
Christian civilization thus far achieved, so
was it the full rounding out of a great cul-
ture that re-created all the arts for its own
expression, invented new ones, and raised
them all to a level of unexampled achieve-
ment. Its abandonment synchronized, if

[76]

THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY

it did not compass, the fail of Christian
civilization and the entrance of the New
Paganism which has now, in its turn, met
its nemesis in its own suicidal aggrandize-
ment.

In trying to express in brief and sugges-
tive form this philosophy of sacramentalism,
I have not confined myself to any one
system, neither to the Dominican, the
Franciscan nor the Augustinian synthesis;
I have tried to establish a working theory
by a moulding together of all three (since
for all practical purposes this is what
historically happened) and I have not dis-
dained a return, on occasion, to the Neo-
Platonists, particularly Plotinus, and to the
Greek and Jewish philosophers themselves,
from whom all their successors have
learned much and at whose feet they have
sat as respectful scholars. Daring much
in this process, I have doubtless fallen into
philosophical error, and perhaps have even
offended against dogmatic truth, but I pro-
fess here and now that I submit all I say to
Catholic Authority, and that I desire to
teach nothing contrary to the Catholic
Faith.

The world as we know it, man, life itself

[77]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

as it works through all creation, is the union
of matter and spirit; and matter is not
spirit, nor spirit matter, nor is one a mode
of the other, but they are two different
creatures. Apart from this union of matter
and spirit there is no life in the sense in
which we know it, and severance is death.
"The body," says St. Thomas, "is not of
the essence of the soul ; but the soul by the
nature of its essence can be united to the
body, so that, properly speaking, the soul
alone is not the species, but the composite,"
and Duns Scotus makes clear the nature and
origin of this common "essence" when he
says there is " on the one hand God as In-
finite Actuality, on the other spiritual and
corporal substances possessing a homo-
geneous common element." That is to say,
both matter and spirit are the result of the
Divine creative act and though separate
and opposed find their common point of
departure in the Divine Actuality.

The created world is the concrete mani-
festation of matter through which, for its
own transformation and redemption, spirit
is active in a constant process of interpene-
tration, whereby matter itself is being
eternally redeemed. What then is matter,

[78]

THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY

and what is spirit? In the theory of Ploti-
nus, " the process of emanation from a
Supreme Principle, the one source of all
existing things, explains the physical and
metaphysical worlds. According as the
principle gives out its energy, it exhausts
itself, its determinations follow a descend-
ing scale, becoming less and less perfect.
Every generative process implies a deca-
dence or inferiority in the generated prod-
uct. And in the series of Divine genera-
tions there must be a final stage, at which
the primal energy, weakened by successive
emissions, is no longer capable of produc-
ing anything real. A limit is necessarily
reached beneath which there cannot be
anything less perfect; this limit is matter.
Matter is merely the space which con-
ditions all corporate existence; it is a pure
possibility of being, mere nothingness, and
is identified with primitive evil."

In the sense he clearly intends, Plotinus'
theory of "emanation" is of course super-
seded by the Christian doctrine of creation,
but it was an illuminating approximation to
final truth. Similarly, God cannot exhaust
Himself, but there is manifestly a great dis-
crepancy in point of perfection between the

[79 I

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

angels at one end of the scale, and simple
matter, before form is given it, at the other,
while in between are the many categories
of creation. Neither is matter ^'mere
nothingness," for it is a created thing
therefore it exists, even without form. I do
not quote Plotinus as authoritative, but
rather as one who through '' natural " reve-
lation has approached closely to the truth
of Divine revelation.

Subjected to certain necessary changes in
terminology I cannot see why this defini-
tion of matter does not coincide with Duns
Scotus' Materia primo prima, which is
thus described by the great Franciscan.
^^ Materia primo prima is the indeterminate
element of contingent things. This does not
exist in Nature, but it has reality in so far
as it constitutes the term of God's creative
activity. By its union with a substantial
form it becomes endowed with the attri-
butes of quantity and becomes secundo
prima. Subject to the substantial changes
of Nature it is matter as we perceive it." *

It is this materia primo prima^ " the term

* Plotinus calls matter "the limit" of Divine generation be-
cause it marks the exhaustion of creative activity. Scotus calls it
"the term" because beyond it God did not will to extend this
creative activity.

[ 80]

THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY

of God's creative activity," that is eternally
subjected to the regenerative process of
spiritual interpenetration, and the result is
organic life.

Is this matter "primitive evil" in the
sense in which Plotinus uses it? No, for
omne ens est bonum and because '' God
made all things good from the beginning."
On the other hand, matter is in itself dead,
inert, constantly exerting on spirit a gravi-
tational pull that must be overcome. In
a real sense, therefore, its inertness does
manifest itself as "evil" since its resistance
to spirit is actual and must be overcome.

What is "spirit" as the term is used
here? The creative Power of the Logos,
in the sense in which St. John interprets
and corrects the early, partial and errone-
ous theory of the Stoics and of Philo. God
the Son, the Eternal Word of the Father,
" the brightness of His glory and the figure
of His substance." "God of God, Light
of Light, very God of very God, begotten
not made, being of one substance with the
Father, by whom all things were made."
Pure wisdom, pure intellect, pure will,
unconditioned by matter, but creating life
out of the operation of His Spirit on and

[ 8i ]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

through matter, and in the fullness of time
becoming Incarnate for the purpose of the
final redemption of man.

Now since man is so compact of matter
and of spirit, it must follow that he cannot
lay hold of that pure spirit, that Absolute
that lies beyond and above all material
conditioning, except through the medium
of matter, through its figures, its symbol-
ism, its ^^ phantasms." Says St. Thomas,
^^ From material things we can rise to
some kind of knowledge of immaterial
things, but not to the perfect knowledge
thereof." The way of life, therefore, is
the increasing endeavour of man to ap-
proach the Absolute through the leading
of the Holy Spirit, so running parallel to
that slow perfecting of matter which is being
effected by the same operation. So matter
takes on a certain sanctity, not only as some-
thing in process of perfection, but as the
vehicle of spirit and its tabernacle, since in
matter spirit is for us in a sense incarnate.

From this process follows of necessity the
whole sacramental system of the Catholic
Church, as this is set over against both the
Protestant theory and that of modernist
symbolism. To the Protestant as to the

[ 82 ]

THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY

Jew the material thing is (though only in
theory) incorrigibly base, to be despised
and treated with contempt, while the
spiritual thing, the soul, may and does unite
itself to, and perfectly achieve union with
ultimate spirit directly, without the in-
tervention of the material vehicle, and in
proportion to its isolation from matter.
The Protestant rejects even the value of the
symbol; the modern symbolist, or ritualist
if you like the word better, sees the symbol
and values it, but he does not recognize
the reality behind the symbol, contenting
himself with what is no more than a form
of poetry or other art, and he no more
achieves either a right philosophy, the real
religion, or that mystical union with God
that is his aim, than does the Protestant or
the scientific rationalist. I speak of gen-
eralities; there are anomalous personalities
that, for His own ends, God gives that
Beatific Vision that " o'erleaps the bounds "
of matter, whereby the law of life is for
them superseded and the material nexus is
abrogated. These are the prophets, seers,
mystics, — the greatest artists perhaps as
well, — but they are not properly of this
world as we know it; for the vast majority

[ 83 ]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

of men the way of matter is the road
proscribed.

How fatal is this pseudo-philosophy that
would cleave life in halves by isolating
matter on one side and spirit on the other,
is shown by the experience of those who
accepted it. Rejecting the Sacraments as
Divine channnels of grace ordered and
established for the transfusion through ma-
terial agencies of the power of God the
Holy Ghost, and denying even the value
of their symbolism; denouncing the priest-
hood as a man-made obstacle between the
created and the Creator; scorning the body
and condemning all material things as hate-
ful and as stumbling-blocks; they never-
theless became the proponents of aggressive
materialism; organizers of industrialism,
creators of "big business" and ''high
finance," exploiters of labour and of
markets, prophets of a civilization of greed,
covetousness and profiteering. It is the
Protestant nations and their enclaves of
Jews that built up that materialistic civil-
ization that in its bloated triumph finds
its own nemesis in the war of the last five
years and the events that are to follow in
the five next years that are to come. The

[ 84 ]

THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY

material thing is deadly only when it is cut
off from the spiritual thing; united, matter
ennobled as an agent, spirit familiarized
through its homely housing, we have that
just balance which has issue in a culture and
a civilization such as that of the Middle
Ages.

Sacramentalism, in theology, in disci-
pline and in philosophy, is the essential
system of Christianity, and it follows in-
evitably from the fundamental doctrines
of the Incarnation and the Redemption.
Those portions of the Church of Christ that
adhere to it in its three manifestations will
endure, the others will wither away.
Furthermore, no compromise is possible
any more than compromise is possible with
truth. As the time came when America
could no longer exist half slave and half
free, so the time has now come (and the
warning has been explicit) when the
Church can no longer exist under the same
conditions.

As the rejection of the Seven Sacraments
deprived northern Europe of that stream
of spiritual energy, forever, and by the
covenant of God, coursing through the
several material channels of operation,

[85 I

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MY|IRH

leaving man bereft of his surest reinforce-
ment against the eternal gravitational pull
of matter; as the abandonment of Catholic
order and discipline unloosed the floods of
intellectual insolence and vulgarian pre-
sumptuousness, cleaving Christianity in
halves and reducing the moiety thereof into
a howling chaos of ill-conditioned heresies,
so the forsaking of sacramental philosophy
left life meaningless except as a sort of neo-
Manicheism as exploited by Calvin and.
the Puritans, and as an everlasting warfare,
the prize of which was material gain
through power or money, as was demon-
strated (though not always avowed) by the
creators and beneficiaries of industrial

r

civilization. The nineteenth century phi-
losophy of Evolution with its dogmas of the
struggle for life, and the survival of the
fittest, was the effort of sincere men to cast
a veil of respectability over a thing in itself
ignominious and unchristian, and the re-
sults of its acceptance have recently been
demonstrated to admiration.

Dualism is the destroyer of righteousness,
and the Catholic philosophy of sacramen-
talism is the antithesis of dualism. The
sanctity of matter as the potential of spirit

[ 86]

THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY

and its dwelling-place on earth; the human-
izing of spirit through its condescension
to man through the making of his body and
all created things its earthly tabernacle,
give, when carried out into logical develop-
ment, a meaning to life and a glory to the
world and an elucidation of otherwise un-
solvable mysteries, and an impulse towards
noble living, neither Protestantism nor
even Christian Science can afford. It is
a real philosophy of life, a standard of
values, a criterion of all possible postulates,
and as its loss meant the world's death, so
its recovery may mean its resurrection.

In harmony with this consummate phi-
losophy, and as its inevitable corollary,
came the whole sacramental system of the
Church, whereby every material thing v^as
recognized as possessing in varying degree
sacramental potentiality, while seven great
Sacraments were instituted to be, each after
its own fashion, a special channel for the
influx of the power of God the Holy Ghost.
Each was a symbol, a "phantasm,'' to use the
word of Aristotle, just as so many other
created things were, or could become,
symbols, but beyond this they were realities,
veritable media for the veritable communi-

[S7]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

cation of veritable Divine grace. Voided of
power, reduced to the status of mere sym-
bols, they become nothing; only the senti-
mental stimuli of personal emotion. There
is no better definition of a Sacrament than
that of Hugh of St. Victor : "The Sacrament
is the corporeal or material element set out
sensibly, representing from its similitude,
signifying from its institution, and contain-
ing from its sanctification, some invisible
and spiritual grace." This is the unvarying
and unvariable doctrine of the Catholic
Church ; and the reason for its existence as
a living and functioning organism, and the
very methods of its operation, follow from
this supreme institution of the Sacraments.
The whole sacramental system is in a sense
an extension of the Redemption, and one
Sacrament, the Eucharist, also in a sense an
extension of the Incarnation, just as it is
also a daily, even hourly, extension in time
of the Sacrifice of Calvary. The Church
considered as simply the fellowship of the
faithful is not an organism, it is an emotion.
The Catholic Church is more than this; it
is a living organism, and as such it is subject
to the definite, explicit and unchanging
laws of its organic system. What happens to

[ 88 ]

THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY

the individual when he ceases to be a justly
co-ordinated organism is demonstrated in
countless insane asylums. What happens
to a State under similar conditions is ac-
complished by Russia and is in process of
evolution in Germany, if not throughout
modern society. Indeed Protestantism it-
self is sufficient evidence of the disastrous
results that follow from such an abnormal
course.

The Incarnation and the Redemption
are not accomplished facts, completed nine-
teen centuries ago, they are processes that
still continue, and their term is fixed only
by the total regeneration and perfecting of
matter, and the Seven Sacraments are the
chiefest among an infinity of sacramental
processses which are the agencies of this
eternal transfiguration.

Christ not only became Incarnate to ac-
complish the Redemption of men as yet
unborn, for endless ages, through the com-
pleted Sacrifice of Calvary, but also to
initiate a new method whereby the results
were to be more perfectly attained; that is
to say, the Church, working through the
specific sacramental agencies He had or-
dained or was later to ordain through His

[ 89]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

direction of the Church He had brought
into being at Pentecost. He did not come
to ordain a revolutionary code of ethics or
even to offer in His own Person a new
Model for human following. He was
neither a newer Socrates nor an older
Buddha, but God Himself, revealing the
whole system of life and the reason for the
world, and, through the New Covenant of
the Catholic Sacraments and the One, In-
divisible Catholic Church preserved from
error in its official determinations in faith
and morals, by virtue of His Presence
therein until the consummation of the
world, to fix this method of salvation in
terms and under conditions identical with
the process of life itself, and in forms fitted
to the comprehension of, and freely avail-
able for, every man that is born of woman.

He did not come to establish in material
form a Kingdom of Heaven on earth or to
provide for its ultimate coming. He in-
deed established a Spiritual Kingdom, His
Church, *' in the world, not of it," but this
is a very different matter — as the centuries
have proved. His Kingdom is not of this
world, nor will it be established here. The
folly and the conceit of nineteenth century

[90]

THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY

evolutionists have received their quietus
during the last few years. There has been
no absolute advance in human development
since the Incarnation, nor yet during the
space of recorded history. Nations rise and
fall, epochs wax and wane, civilizations
grow out of savagery, crest, and sink back
into savagery again. Redemption is for the
individual, not for the race nor yet for
society as a whole, nor even for matter itself
except as this becomes definite and concrete
in the individual ; and there, and only there,
and under that form, it is sure, however
long may be the period of its accomplish-
ment. ^'Time is the ratio of the resistance
of matter to the interpenetration of Spirit"
and by this resistance is the duration of
time determined. When it shall have been
wholly overcome then ''time shall be no
more." God the Holy Ghost, proceed-
ing from the Father and the Son, and by
the channel of each individual soul, oper-
ates directly on the matter which in human
form is the object of redemption, and the
Sacraments are not only the Divinely or-
dained agencies of this operation but the
perfect symbols of life itself.

See therefore how perfect is the corre-

[91 ]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

spondence between the Sacraments and the
method of life where they are the agents
and which they symbolically set forth.
There is in each case the material form and
the spiritual substance or energy. As Hugh
of St. Victor says, each represents from its
similitude, signifies from its institution, and
contains from its sanctification some invis-
ible and spiritual grace. Water, chrism,
oil, the spoken word, the touch of the hands,
the sign of the cross, and finally and su-
premely the bread and wine of Holy Mass,
each a material thing but each representing,
signifying and containing some gift of the
Holy Spirit, real, absolute and potent. So
matter and spirit are linked together in
every operation of Holy Church from the
cradle to the grave, and man has ever before ,
him the eternal revelation of this linked
union of matter and spirit in his life, the
eternal teaching of the honour of the ma-
terial thing through its agency and through
its existence as the subject for redemption,
while through the material association and
the Divine condescension to his earthly and
fallible estate (limited by the association
with matter to only inadequate presenta-
tion) he makes the spirit of God his own,

[92]

THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY

to dwell therewith after the fashion of
man.

As I have said elsewhere, ^' Man ap-
proaches, and must always approach, spirit-
ual things not only through material forms
but by means of material agencies. The
highest and most beautiful things, those
where the spirit seems to achieve its loftiest
reaches, are frequently associated with the
grossest and most unspiritual material
forms, yet the very splendour of the spirit-
ual verity redeems and glorifies the mate-
rial agency, while on the other hand the
homeliness and even animal quality of the
material thing brings to man, with a poign-
ancy and an appeal that are incalculable,
the spiritual thing that in its absolute es-
sence would be so far beyond his ken and
his experience and his powers of assimila-
tion that it would be inoperative."

This is the true Humanism, not the
fictitious and hollow thing that was the off-
spring of Neo-Paganism and took to itself
a title to which it had no claim. Held con-
sciously or tacitly by the men of the Middle
Ages from the immortal philosopher to
the immortal but nameless craftsman, it
was the force that built up the noble social

[93]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

structure of the time and poised man him-
self in a sure equilibrium. Already it had
of necessity developed the whole scheme
of religious ceremonial and given art a new
content and direction through its new
service. By analogy and association all
material things that could be so used were
employed as figures and symbols, as well
as agencies, through the Sacraments, and
after a fashion that struck home to the
soul through the organs of sense. Music,
vestments, poetry and dramatic action, in-
cense, candles, flowers, all were linked with
the great arts of architecture, painting and
sculpture, and all became not only ministers
to the emotional faculties but direct appeals
to the intellect through their function as
poignant symbols. So art received its soul,
and was almost a living thing until matter
and spirit were again divorced in the death
that severed them during the Reformation,
and thereafter religion entered upon a
period of slow desiccation and sterilization
wherever the symbol was cast away with
the Sacraments and the sacramental phi-
losophy that had made it live. Indifference
or hostility to the pregnant and evocative
and supremely beautiful ceremonial of the

[94 I

THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY

Catholic Faith is less ignorance of the
meaning and function of art and an inherited
hatred of its quality and its power, than
they are the natural reactions of the con-
scious and determined rejection of the
essential philosophy of the Catholic Church,
which is sacramentalism.

With the first perfecting of this philos-
ophy during the twelfth and thirteenth cen-
turies along the three parallel lines of
Hugh of St. Victor, Duns Scotus and St.
Thomas Aquinas, came concurrently the
brief but glorious flowering of Christian
civilization from 1050 to 1300. It was
then that not only philosophy, but theology,
education, literature and all the old regen-
erated arts, and many new arts as well,
achieved a sort of grand climacteric. It
was during the same period that human
society, political, industrial and economic,
accomplished its highest perfection under
Christianity, and the force widespread
throughout the social organism concen-
trated itself in such focal points of dazzling
light as St. Louis, St. Thomas and Dante,
the Arthurian legend, the perfected Grego-
rian music and Reims Cathedral.

The whole sacramental system of philos- .

[95 1

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

ophy was of an almost sublime perfection
and simplicity, and the Catholic Sacraments
were both its goal and its types. If they had
been of the same value and identical in na-
ture they would have failed of perfect expo-
sition, in the sense in which they were types
or symbols. They were not this, for while
six of the explicit seven were sufficiently
of one mode, there was one where the con-
ditions that held elsewhere were tran-
scended and where, in addition to the two
functions it was instituted to perform, it
gave through its similitude the clear revela-
tion of the most significant and pregnant
fact in the vast mystery of life. I mean
of course the Holy Eucharist.

I desire to approach this consideration
with the most complete abasement and pro-
found reverence. I am not unmindful of
the wise saying of St. Thomas a Kempis
"'Twere well not to inquire too curiously
into the nature of this Sacrament," but it
is impossible to complete the consideration
of what is the essential philosophy of Chris-
tianity unless this point is made clear. The
designation, the nomenclature, dates back
perhaps no farther than Hildebert of Tours
in the eleventh century; the fact is attested

[96]

THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY

as a theological and philosophical proposi-
tion by Paschasus Radbertus two cen-
turies earlier, that is to say, in the time
of Charlemagne. I refer to the dogma of
Transubstantiation as expressing the man-
ner whereby the Real Presence of God
Incarnate is accomplished in the Holy
Eucharist.

Now, in the first place, I wish to protest
against two statements that are frequently
made by those who are inimically disposed
towards this doctrine. First, that it is only
a quibbling over definitions that do not
efifect the fact; second, that defence of Tran-
substantiation is an affected and antiqua-
rian attempt to restore a detail of an
outworn scholasticism. I maintain that
neither is true, but that, on the contrary,
Transubstantiation meets a philosophical
necessity inherent in the system of sacra-
mentalism which is afforded by no other
assumption whatever. There are four
possible theories: 1st, the Zwinglian, which
as has been said, actually amounts to the
"real absence" and may be disregarded,
since it is contradicted by Christ Himself,
has no place in historic Christianity back
to the Apostolic Fathers, and is rejected by

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GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

Ecclesia Anglicana and even by the Lu-
theran and Westminster Confessions; 2nd,
the Lutheran, that is to say, consubstantia-
tion; Jrd, the theory of Osiander, some-
times called ^' impanation," where Christ is
really present through an hypostatic union ;
these last two covering, I suppose, the be-
liefs of the great majority of Anglicans;
and there is finally the Catholic doctrine
of Transubstantiation.

I am speaking now wholly from a phil-
osophical standpoint. It is perhaps true that
the doctrines of Osiander and Luther, as
these are interpreted by Anglicans, are
sufficient from a theological and a devo-
tional standpoint. If life is what it is held
to be by the philosophy of the Catholic
Church, then the Catholic theory (or
dogma, as it has been since the Council of
Trent) is the only one which completes, by
its symbolism and its assertion of fact, the
sacramental showing forth, through great
symbols, of the nature of life.

Under all other interpretation of this
great Mystery, which is the crown of all
the Sacraments, it does not differ from
them except in degree; as in the case of
the water of Baptism, the material agent

[98]

THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY

remains unchanged, — it is matter still, pre-
cisely as before the words and acts of Con-
secration. The wafer is still unleavened
bread, the wine and water have not changed
in character; they have simply become the
vehicle whereby God gives Himself to
man. At the most the substance, bread, and
the Substance, the Body of Christ, exist to-
gether after a mystical manner, /. e, through
consubstantiation.

This doctrine of the Real Presence leaves
the elements essentially unchanged, not only
in their substance but in their accidents; but
by spiritual interpenetration they become
for the communicant, the offerer of the Holy
Sacrifice, and those for whom it is offered,
the Body and Blood of Christ. On the other
hand the Catholic doctrine is that by the act
of Consecration the very substance of the
bread and wine are transformed into an
altogether different Substance, the very
Body and Blood of Christ, only the acci-
dents of form, colour, ponderability, etc.,
remaining.

It would be presumptuous for me to
compare or contrast these two views of
the Blessed Sacrament from a religious
standpoint. Speaking philosophically, the

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GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

doctrine of Transubstantiation certainly re-
veals and substantiates a great principle
that may be the very secret of life itself and
the reason for the existence of the world,
while its abandonment by Protestants, not
to mention infidels and agnostics, lies close
at the root of that materialism that has
reached its logical climax in the present
world-wide catastrophe.

If matter is forever matter, inert, un-
changeable, indestructible, then it is hard
to escape the sense of dualism in the uni-
verse: matter and spirit uniting in man as
body and soul, in the sacraments as the
vehicle and the essence, but temporally
and temporarily; doomed always to ulti-
mate severance either by death or by the
completion of each sacramental process.
Suppose, on the other hand, the object of
the universe and of time is the constant re-
demption and transformation of matter,
through its interpenetration by spirit
through the power of God the Holy Ghost.
Suppose that the miracle of Transubstantia-
tion is but the type and showing forth of
the incessant process of life whereby, every
instant, matter itself is being changed and
glorified, and transferred from the plane

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THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY

of matter — the earth-plane — to the plane
of spirit — the heavenly plane. Is not this
the meaning of St. Paul's "There is an
earthly body and there is a spiritual body;
we are sown in corruption, we are raised
in incorruptibility.'^

If this is so, if the Incarnation and
Redemption are types and symbols of the
Divine process forever proceeding here on
earth, then while the other Sacraments are
in themselves not only agencies of grace,
but manifestations of that process whereby
in all things matter is used as the vehicle
of the spirit, the Mass, transcending them
all, is not only Communion, not only a
Sacrifice for the quick and the dead accept-
able before God, but it is also the unique
symbol of the redemption and transforma-
tion of matter, since, of all the Sacraments,
it is the only one where the very physical
qualities of the material vehicle are trans-
formed, and while the accidents alone re-
main, the substance, finite and perishable,
becomes in an instant of time, and by the
Divine miracle of Transubstantiation, in-
finite and immortal.

I confess that to me the Catholic argu-
ment is unanswerable and that only through

' [ loi ]

GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND A4YRRH

this doctrine is the philosophy of Christi-
anity rounded out to its fullness. "This
is a hard saying: who shall hear it?" and
many go back and walk no more with Christ
even as in the days when the words were
spoken: "Verily, verily, I say unto you,
except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man
and drink His blood, ye have no life in
you. Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh
my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise
him up at the last day. For my flesh is
meat indeed and my blood is drink indeed.
He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my
blood, dwelleth in me and I in him. As
the living Father hath sent me, and I live
by the Father: so he that eateth me, even he
shall live by me. This" is that bread which
came down from heaven : not as your fathers
did eat manna, and are dead : he that eateth
of this bread shall live forever."

We do well to look and work for a new
brotherhood of man on earth as the crown-
ing gift of the War: we do better when we
pray and labour for the reunion of all
Christendom in the One, Holy, Catholic and
Apostolic Church, but neither the one nor
the other is to be achieved unless to right
religion we add a right philosophy. In-

[ I02 ]

THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY

ternational covenants are ropes of sand,
without international love, justice and fidel-
ity, and there is no engine or device of
Christian union that v^ill be operative
unless it is energized and consecrated by
charity — caritas — and a consistent, crea-
tive, sovereign philosophy of life. If v^e
would have one or both, the Church and the
Brotherhood — and both we must have if
we are to escape the peril of a new Dark
Ages — let us look to it that our religion
is redeemed, our philosophy recreated, for
otherwise neither individually nor collec-
tively can we meet and turn back the new
hordes of Huns and Vandals now gathering
for another onslaught on an imperial but
futile civilization — no more supreme and
irresistible than that other their own kind
brought to an end in fire and sack and
slaughter just fifteen centuries ago.

I desire to make my plea for the restora-
tion of the one Christian philosophy, in
all its integrity and with nothing cut out or
cast aside, solely on the ground of its ever-
lasting truth; but even in the acceptance
of truth and the establishing of justice there
is expediency. As the first step towards a
new world-order is a right philosophy —

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GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

the power '' to put things in their right
places and control them well/' — so it has its
bearings on matters that touch us at present
very closely, and that must be adjusted
without delay if we are to play our part in
the new though almost desperate Crusade
for the redemption of the Holy Places of
the human soul. For the lack of a right
philosophy (or of any philosophy whatever,
for that matter) the Councillors of the
Nations now assembled flounder and fall
down, while the nemesis of world-anarchy
swiftly overtakes their chaotic delibera-
tions. For the lack of a right philosophy
we of Ecclesia Anglicana parallel their
courses, and have done so time out of
mind. The time has come when neither
charity nor expediency can permit the
Church to continue along the lines of uni-
versal comprehension. The Great Testing
is at hand, and before that menace of in-
comparable potency the House of Salvation
cannot rest divided against itself. As it
is religion alone, the religion of Christ
crucified, that can save man at this juncture,
so is it the Catholic Church, through its
Sacraments and by the strength of its sup-
porting philosophy, that alone can act as

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THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY

the engine of redemptive operation. In
the red light of menacing dissolution every
predilection, every prejudice, every per-
sonal conviction; all except the solemn and
unmistakable mandate of conscience alone,
must be sacrificed and cast aside. The
unity of the Church in the Catholic Faith
and under Catholic Authority is the instant
and desperate necesssity.

To this end the first step is the explicit
acceptance of the Catholic doctrine of the
Sacraments, and the Catholic philosophy
of sacramentalism, with Holy Mass as the
true Communion of the true Body and
Blood of Christ, as an ever new Sacrifice
acceptable before God for the sins of the
whole world, and as, in the words of St.
Thomas, ^' the end and aim of all the
Sacraments," with Transubstantiation as
the sufficient expression of the manner of
Christ's Presence therein.

I think it is the lack of this clear con-
sciousness, theologically and philosophi-
cally, that is answerable for the vacillating
and compromising courses we are disposed
to follow, now at this critical moment when
we realize that unity in the Church is
closely bound up with the great problem

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GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

whether civilization, even society itself, is
to continue except after a second five cen-
turies of Dark Ages. Rightly and hon-
ourably we look on the one hand towards
the Protestant denominations, on the other
towards all those in Communion with the
Apostolic See, tentatively approaching
them with well-meant advances, in the des-
perate hope that so we may have some part
in the restoration of Catholic unity. I can-
not avoid the conviction that the lack of a
definite philosophy has much to do with
the variousness of these approaches and the
very great unwisdom of some amongst them.
A case in point is the question of the ac-
ceptance of Episcopal order on the part of
those bodies that have rejected it and still
protest they desire it not at all. It ap-
pears that both in England and America
propositions have from time to time been
made that practically amount to this: that
if the Protestant bodies will only accept
the Episcopate as a fact, no questions will
be asked as to any theories they may hold
as to its nature and function. Now under
correction I maintain that this is a case of
failing "to put things in their right order
and control them well.'' If the Episcopate

[ io6]

THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY

represented simply a form of order and
government, even with Divine sanction
and institution, this might be possible, but
in that case I submit we should have no
moral right to impose it as an absolute con-
dition, when the question of unity is in-
volved. The doctrine of the Catholic
Church is not this, however. The Episco-
pate has two functions, one of which is the
supreme governance of the faithful; but
the other and primary function is the trans-
mission to certain men of the Power of the
Holy Ghost for the work of a priest in the
Church of God, that is to say, first of all for
administering the Sacraments of Baptism,
Penance, Matrimony and Unction, and,
above all, the Communion of the Body and
Blood of Christ and the offering of the
Holy Sacrifice. In other words, it is not
the fact of Episcopacy that matters, it is
the function, and the chief function of the
Bishop is the making of priests who can
consecrate the Eucharist, forgive sins, and
offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Altar.

If then we had a clear and unanimous
theological conviction fortified by an
equally clear philosophy, we should say to
the ministers of those whom we euphe-

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GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

mistically call "our separated brethren,"
not " accept our Bishops and let them have
the privilege of ordaining you after their
own fashion and we will ask no embar-
rasssing questions as to what you think of
it all, or even if you believe you have so
gained nothing you did not have before"
but rather " You are now a duly accredited
^minister of the Gospel'; do you want
to be made a priest? If you do, if you want
to act as the agent of God, through the
Power of the Holy Ghost to perform the
Divine miracle of changing bread and wine
into the very Body and Blood of Christ;
if you want to gain power for the remitting
of sins, and if you want to ofiFer the Holy
Sacrifice of the Altar for the quick and the
dead and for the sins of the whole world —
then you will accept the fact and the au-
thority of the Episcopate, and the laying
on of hands whereby alone a priest is made
by the covenant of God."

So also would it be in the case of laymen,
who no longer would " come into the
Church " because they had ritualistic lean-
ings, or preferred a dififerent social atmos-
phere, or for any other of the many causes
now operative; they would come because

[ io8 ]

THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY

they wanted to confess their sins and receive
absolution, because they wanted to feed on
Christ Himself through Holy Communion,
because they desired to join with the priest
in offering the Sacrifice of the Mass for
themselves, for their dead, and for the
world.

From the lack of a right philosophy our
theology is led along divergent lines of
strange variation, our order and discipline
are weakened to the point of nullity, and
even our religion fails of its fullest pos-
sibilities, and I know of no way in which
Ecclesia Anglicana can rise to its vast op-
portunity at a moment when its peculiar
qualities are most needed for the energiz-
ing of a true Vita Nuova, than by the re-
turn to that sacramental philosophy of the
Middle Ages which is the only sufficient
system and the only intellectually adequate
system thus far revealed to man.

From such acceptance, or from the con-
scious desire for it and progress towards
it, will follow of necessity certain acts and
ordinances, for every spiritual thing has
its material expression. The Mass as the
one obligatory service of worship, and ac-
cepted both as Communion and Sacrifice;

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GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH

formal recognition of marriage as a Sac-
rament and therefore indissoluble; the res-
toration of sacramental confession as the
normal method of spiritual reconciliation;
above all, the establishing of Reservation
of the Blessed Sacrament, not only for sick-
calls but specifically for private and public
adoration, as the recognized custom in every
cathedral and parish church. I should
perhaps urge the last as the most immedi-
ately necessary of all. Where the Sacra-
ment is reserved there is no doubt as to the
Catholic faithfulness of priest and people,
and as matters rest with us today, it is neces-
sary that the Anglican Church should stand
forth from the cowardice and time-serving
of an older age to bear witness to the truth
of the Incarnation and the Redemption as
these are shown forth in the Sacrament of
the Body and Blood of Christ. Not only
does the Presence of Christ in the taber-
nacle transform a church from an echoing
conventicle into the very courts of God;
not only does it teach mutely but potently
as no human voice can do; not only does it
lead irresistibly on to the exaltation of the
Mass as the one supreme Sacrament and
to the other six as of equal authority and

[ no]

THE PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY

obligation; it is also, and for my present
purpose most essentially, the explicit, visi-
ble teaching of that philosophy which alone
can lead men '' to put things in their right
order and control them well," so perhaps
averting from us the nemesis of our own
follies and falsities, now increasingly in-
dicated in the Apocalyptic happenings of
the world.

I ask then a return, explicit and un-
compromising, to that philosophy of life
which was the crowning intellectual glory
of the great era of the Middle Ages when
Christianity was fully operative; to that
philosophy which supplemented, in unity
and perfection, that Catholic religion that
had issue in a righteous and beneficent
social system, in a political estate marked
by justice and liberty, and in a great and
incomparable plexus of all the arts that
flowered at last in that Cathedral of Our
Lady of Reims which its antithesis, in-
carnate in modernism, could only desecrate
and destroy.

[ III ]

\J

"^