But half our troubles come from these absurd dilemmas. Do you believe in faith or in organisation? Well; do I believe in my eyes or my ears? Why not in both? Of course organisation cannot take the place of faith; of course faith without order is better than order without faith. But why cannot we have in the Church what we have got in the nation faith operative through order as loyalty is operative through the State and in service to it?
The earlier objection, however, is equally serious. Catholicism has failed in the past and is failing now. One main ground of its failure is to be found, I believe, in its inadequate recognition of nationality, which has avenged itself by almost ousting Catholicism, and with it Christianity itself, where national interests are concerned.[#]
[#] I am speaking throughout of the Western Church: the Eastern Church has perhaps been, if anything, too national.
This failure to give adequate recognition to nationality arises from too exclusive emphasis on the principle which is, quite rightly, the root idea of Catholicism—the idea of transcendence. Here in the last resort is the fundamental distinction between naturalism and religion; naturalism may take a form which stimulates the religious emotions and supports a high ethical ideal; but it confines itself to the limits of secular experience. For naturalism the history of man and of the universe is the starting-point and the goal; this as fact is the datum, this as understood is the solution. The Will of God, on this view, is to be discovered from the empirical course and tendency of history. But religion begins with God; it breaks in upon what we ordinarily call "experience" from outside; in its monotheistic form it regards the world as created by God for His own pleasure, and lasting only during that pleasure; in its pantheistic form it regards the world as a phase or a moment of His Being which is by no means limited to that phase or moment. Its philosophy does not elaborately conceive what God must be like in order to be the solution of our perplexities, but, starting with the assurance of His Being and Nature, shows how this is in fact the answer to all our needs.
It is one peculiarity and glory of Christianity that it unites both of those. Its faith is fixed upon One who "for us men and for our salvation _came down from heaven_," and who is yet the eternal Word through which all things were made, the indwelling principle of all existence. Transcendence and immanence are here perfectly combined. But because the former is the distinctively religious element, without which the latter would have been in danger of relapsing into naturalism, the deliberate emphasis was all laid on transcendence. We can see, as we look back, that when once the Incarnation has actually taken place upon the plane of history, it makes no jot of difference in logic, provided only that the Life of the Incarnate is taken as the starting-point and centre of thought, whether terms of transcendence or of immanence are used. The life of Christ is at once the irruption of the Divine into the world—(for the previous history of the world certainly does not explain it)—and is also the manifestation of the indwelling power which had all along sustained the world. In other words, the God who redeems is the same God who creates and sustains. But it is still true that the note of transcendence, of something given to man by God as distinct from something emerging out of man in his search of God, is the specifically religious note.