The Catholic Church and conversionChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Religion
The Catholic Church and conversion
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Conversion -- Catholic Church
The Church is a house with a hundred gates; and no two men enter at
exactly the same angle. Mine was at least as much Agnostic as Anglican,
though I accepted for a time the borderland of Anglicanism; but only on
the assumption that it could really be Anglo-Catholicism. There is a
distinction of ultimate intention there which in the vague English
atmosphere is often missed. It is not a difference of degree but of
definite aim. There are High Churchmen as much as Low Churchmen who are
concerned first and last to save the Church of England. Some of them
think it can be saved by calling it Catholic, or making it Catholic, or
believing that it is Catholic; but _that_ is what they want to save. But
I did not start out with the idea of saving the English Church, but of
finding the Catholic Church. If the two were one, so much the better;
but I had never conceived of Catholicism as a sort of showy attribute or
attraction to be tacked on to my own national body, but as the inmost
soul of the true body, wherever it might be. It might be said that
Anglo-Catholicism was simply my own uncompleted conversion to
Catholicism. But it was from a position originally much more detached
and indefinite that I had been converted, an atmosphere if not agnostic
at least pantheistic or Unitarian. To this I owe the fact that I find it
very difficult to take some of the Protestant propositions even
seriously. What is any man who has been in the real outer world, for
instance, to make of the everlasting cry that Catholic traditions are
condemned by the Bible? It indicates a jumble of topsy-turvy tests and
tail-foremost arguments, of which I never could at any time see the
sense. The ordinary sensible sceptic or pagan is standing in the street
(in the supreme character of the man in the street) and he sees a
procession go by of the priests of some strange cult, carrying their
object of worship under a canopy, some of them wearing high head-dresses
and carrying symbolical staffs, others carrying scrolls and sacred
records, others carrying sacred images and lighted candles before them,
others sacred relics in caskets or cases, and so on. I can understand
the spectator saying, “This is all hocus-pocus”; I can even understand
him, in moments of irritation, breaking up the procession, throwing down
the images, tearing up the scrolls, dancing on the priests and anything
else that might express that general view. I can understand his saying,
“Your croziers are bosh, your candles are bosh, your statues and scrolls
and relics and all the rest of it are bosh.” But in what conceivable
frame of mind does he rush in to select one particular scroll of the
scriptures of this one particular group (a scroll which had always
belonged to them and been a part of their hocus-pocus, if it was
hocus-pocus); why in the world should the man in the street say that one
particular scroll was _not_ bosh, but was the one and only truth by
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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