Of
its nature it struggles with us. And we, we, when our youth is full on
us, invariably reject it and set out in the sunlight content with
natural things. Then for a long time we are like men who follow down
the cleft of a mountain and the peaks are hidden from us and
forgotten. It takes years to reach the dry plain, and then we look
back and see our home.
What is it, do you think, that causes the return? I think it is the
problem of living; for every day, every experience of evil, demands a
solution. That solution is provided by the memory of the great scheme
which at last we remember. Our childhood pierces through again ... But
I will not attempt to explain it, for I have not the power; only I
know that we who return suffer hard things; for there grows a gulf
between us and many companions. We are perpetually thrust into
minorities, and the world almost begins to talk a strange language; we
are troubled by the human machinery of a perfect and superhuman
revelation; we are over-anxious for its safety, alarmed, and in danger
of violent decisions.
And this is hard: that the Faith begins to make one abandon the old
way of judging. Averages and movements and the rest grow uncertain. We
see things from within and consider one mind or a little group as a
salt or leaven. The very nature of social force seems changed to us.
And this is hard when a man has loved common views and is happy only
with his fellows.
And this again is very hard, that we must once more take up that awful
struggle to reconcile two truths and to keep civic freedom sacred in
spite of the organization of religion, and not to deny what is
certainly true. It is hard to accept mysteries, and to be humble. We
are tost as the great schoolmen were tost, and we dare not neglect the
duty of that wrestling.
But the hardest thing of all is that it leads us away, as by a
command, from all that banquet of the intellect than which there is no
keener joy known to man.
I went slowly up the village place in the dusk, thinking of this
deplorable weakness in men that the Faith is too great for them, and
accepting it as an inevitable burden. I continued to muse with my eyes
upon the ground ...
There was to be no more of that studious content, that security in
historic analysis, and that constant satisfaction of an appetite which
never cloyed. A wisdom more imperative and more profound was to put a
term to the comfortable wisdom of learning. All the balance of
judgement, the easy, slow convictions, the broad grasp of things, the
vision of their complexity, the pleasure in their innumerable
life - all that had to be given up. Fanaticisms were no longer entirely
to be despised, just appreciations and a strong grasp of reality no
longer entirely to be admired.
The Catholic Church will have no philosophies. She will permit no
comforts; the cry of the martyrs is in her far voice; her eyes that
see beyond the world present us heaven and hell to the confusion of
our human reconciliations, our happy blending of good and evil things.
By the Lord! I begin to think this intimate religion as tragic as a
great love. There came back into my mind a relic that I have in my
house. It is a panel of the old door of my college, having carved on
it my college arms. I remembered the Lion and the Shield, _Haec fuit,
Haec almae janua sacra domus._ Yes, certainly religion is as tragic as
first love, and drags us out into the void away from our dear homes.
It is a good thing to have loved one woman from a child, and it is a
good thing not to have to return to the Faith.
They cook worse in Undervelier than any place I was ever in, with the
possible exception of Omaha, Neb.
LECTOR. Why do you use phrases like _'possible exception'?_
AUCTOR. Why not? I see that all the religion I have stuck into the
book has no more effect on you than had Rousseau upon Sir Henry Maine.
You are as full of Pride as a minor Devil. You would avoid the
_cliche_ and the commonplace, and the _phrase toute faite_. Why? Not
because you naturally write odd prose - contrariwise, left to yourself
you write pure journalese; but simply because you are swelled and
puffed up with a desire to pose. You want what the Martha Brown school
calls 'distinction' in prose. My little friend, I know how it is done,
and I find it contemptible. People write their articles at full speed,
putting down their unstudied and valueless conclusions in English as
pale as a film of dirty wax - sometimes even they dictate to a
typewriter. Then they sit over it with a blue pencil and carefully
transpose the split infinitives, and write alternative adjectives, and
take words away out of their natural place in the sentence and
generally put the Queen's English - yes, the Queen's English - on the
rack. And who is a penny the better for it? The silly authors get no
real praise, not even in the horrible stucco villas where their clique
meet on Sundays. The poor public buys the _Marvel_ and gasps at the
cleverness of the writing and despairs, and has to read what it can
understand, and is driven back to toshy novels about problems, written
by cooks. 'The hungry sheep,' as some one says somewhere, 'look up and
are not fed;' and the same poet well describes your pipings as being
on wretched straw pipes that are 'scrannel' - a good word.
