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Inner Life of a Catholic

The Profession of Faith 

As we read again what we have written in the chapters that follow, we are conscious of the dividing line that separates men into two camps today, camps which become more and more defined. On the one side are those, of whatever creed, who accept the supernatural as a reality, on the other are those who do not. To the latter there is no beyond, or if there is it does not concern them. God may or may not be; in either case He does not come into their reckoning. Therefore for them every definition of every fundamental principle of life must be framed without Him. Life itself and its object; duty and its obligations; freedom and its consequent responsibilities; love and its return; sacrifice and its reward; evil, its significance, its guilt, its punishment, its cure; good, its value, its nobility, its recompense, its fruit; man's relations with himself, with his fellow men, with his country, with friends and enemies, with the whole human race; possession, power, pleasure; right and justice; truth and honesty; virtue and vice; all these things, for him to whom the supernatural means nothing, must be given definitions utterly different from those accepted by believers in God. Indeed there can be no definitions; where man is himself his own ideal, his own standard, his own judge, his own goal, all these things, however the fact may be disguised, must in the end be subject to his own service, must become means to satisfy, to complete himself.

For such this book can have no meaning whatsoever. It will only irritate him, it may stir his contempt. He will call it a mass of self-delusion, unscientific—a word that does not belong to this generation only—antiquated, a dream wanting in common sense, not confirmed by experience, perhaps even a bondage, invented by priests and religious to trap and enthrall free man. To one who may see only this in the book, we would ask him to lay it down; it is not meant for him. We would only say to him that the life and ideals it has attempted to describe, are those of fifteen hundred years; that though they are old yet are they also new, fresh as the infants and children who, in millions annually, continue to imbibe them and build their lives upon them. Nay more, apart from the three hundred and fifty millions of believing Christians, there are hundreds of millions more, whom sometimes we call pagans, to whom the supernatural is a great reality, and for whom the ideal here described has a full and acceptable meaning.

Modern unbelief is a very isolated thing; it looms large, but in comparison with the race of man, and even with the Christendom in which it raises its head, it is very small, confined, in a groove all its own. It is called the new paganism; in justice to the true pagan we should give it another name, for the true pagan condemns it even more than do Christian men.

But on the other side there are those to whom God and the supernatural are a great reality, who know in whom they have believed, and are certain that they have not been mistaken. They believe, not as an opinion only, that they belong to God, and that God has a care of His own. They believe that God has spoken, has told us things we could never have discovered of ourselves, has, in His love and care, given us laws and commandments for the ordering of our lives. Therefore, for them, because He has spoken, life and duty, love and sacrifice, evil and good, right and justice, have meanings and definitions far-more clear and certain than man could ever devise of himself; they have sanctions which make them and the civilization built upon them, far more stable than anything man of himself can build. It is for these in the first place that this book is written, whether they agree with all it contains or not; at least their judgment will rest upon first principles concerning which reader and writer are agreed.

Without that initial agreement progress in mutual understanding is impossible.