CHAPTER 21 - DISPENSING THE GIFTS

OBSERVE the aptness of all this to the nature of man.
Religion is a relation of man to God, and a true religion must be true to both.
God will treat man as man is, and man will react to God's act as man is.

I

Looking at man, almost the first thing we see about him is that he is not an isolated unit independent of others, but a social being bound to others both by needs which cannot be satisfied and by powers which must remain unused save in relation to other men. It would be strange if God, having made man social, should ignore the fact in His own personal dealings with man. To treat man as an isolated independent unit would be as monstrous in religion as it would be in any other department of human life. It would be to treat man as what he is not. But the one being who would not be likely to do that is God, who made man what he is, and made him so because that is what He wanted him to be. A religion which should consist in an individual relation of each person directly to God would be no religion for man. A social being requires a social religion. Within that social religion the individual will have his own religious needs and experiences, but they will be within and not external to, or a substitute for, his approach to God and God's approach to him in union with other men.

Individualist religious theories there have always been, even among Christians. They have never been able to carry out the full logic of their individualist theory because their nature as men stood too solidly in their way. Something in religion they have had to get from other men. So the Bible Christian, despising priesthood and minimizing Church, has yet had to fall back upon the Bible, and the Bible, although it is given to us by God, is given through men, the men who under His inspiration wrote it. A religion wherein the soul finds and maintains a relation with God with no dependence upon men is impossible, and what makes it impossible is the nature God gave man. The only question then is whether religion shall do its very uttermost to elude the social element in man's nature, accepting only so much as it can by no possibility avoid; or whether it shall wholly accept and glory in the social element as something given by God, something therefore to be used to the uttermost in religion as in the rest of man's life. In giving man the religion of the Kingdom, God showed what His own answer is.

Christ did not leave His followers free at their discretion to form their own groups if it seemed good to them or to remain isolated if it seemed good to them. He banded them into a society, a Church. He gave Himself for us, to ransom us from all our guilt, a people set apart for Himself.

What the Jews had been, the Church now is. We remember Moses' words: This is the blood of the covenant.

But now we have Christ's words: This is My blood of the new covenant.

There is a new covenant and a new people: not just millions of redeemed individuals: a people. The brother-hood of every Christian with Christ involves the brotherhood of all Christians with one another. His normal way of giving them His gifts of truth and life was to be through the society: in other words, the whole Christian life was not to be a solitary relation of each soul to Christ, but of each to all in Christ, this is what the Apostles' Creed means by the Communion of Saints. In solidarity with other men we fell in Adam and rose again with Christ; in the same solidarity we live the new life.

God can and does give this or that man what he individually needs. But the great needs of the soul are not peculiar to the individual, but the same for all. There is the need for the Life which Christ came that we might have more abundantly; and the need for Knowledge— knowledge of what God is and what man is, and of the goal of life and how we are to attain it. It is through the society that God offers to all men the spiritual gifts by which these needs common to all are supplied. The relation of Christians with one another is essential in their relation with Christ. They are related to Him not one by one, but in virtue of their membership of His Kingdom.
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II

The close correspondence of religion with the nature of man is continued in every detail of the provision God made for the communication of His gifts of truth and life. We shall consider truth first.

The mind of man is capable of knowing reality and needs to know reality. It is of the nature of man to will his action in accordance with what he knows. His eternal destiny depends upon the choices he thus makes. Light therefore is essential for his proper operation as man. Further, man not only needs knowledge, he craves it and is capable of astonishing energy and even astonishing sacrifice in the pursuit of it. Within the Kingdom all this side of man's nature is superbly provided for. There is no limit to the possibility of man's growth in knowledge, in the light. Further his growth is not to be by way of spoon-feeding, but by way of an intellectual effort which will call into play every muscle his mind has. It is to be noted that if Christ came to save men. He certainly did not come to save them trouble. It is not part of His purpose to do for men what they can very well do themselves, but only what they cannot. Just as in the act of atonement the humanity of Christ gave all that humanity had to give and the divinity of the person supplied only what human nature could not give; so in the matter of truth, and indeed in the matter of life, too. God supplies what man can not, but expects man to do the uttermost that he can.

There are certain things that the mind of man at its most powerful cannot compass. Merely by thinking, we cannot know what is in the mind of another or what some place is like that we have not visited. On these matters we must either be told by some-one who knows, or else remain ignorant. That is why God has given men His revelation upon what He had in mind when He created man, upon what awaits us after death, and upon what kind of action here upon earth will bring us to our true destiny. There is a multiplicity of such truths which man could not find for himself, and God has supplied them. The Kingdom came into being endowed with an overflowing treasury of them, all the truths contained in the revelation of God written down in Scripture (completed now as men were inspired to write the books of the New Testament), or held securely in the mind of the Apostles— securely, for Our Lord has promised that the Holy Ghost would bring to their memory all things whatsoever He had taught them. Given this rich treasure of truths, the minds of Christians could work upon them in all the ways in which a mind can work— by close study of them in their direct statement, by meditation upon the implications wrapped up in any given piece of truth, and again upon its relation to other truths; by that intimacy which comes almost unawares from living by the truths; from prayer and contemplation. All this the mind of man could do. It is its proper field. And thereby the mind of man could make vast progress, not adding to the truth, but seeing more profoundly, more richly and vitally, finding new ways of stating the truths so as to get more light from them, and bring more of life within the circle of their light. What the mind of man could not do was to know with absolute certainty whether all its gains were really gains, or whether some admixture of error might not have crept in. Some men did make statements which other men thought to be false; and there was much controversy and at one time one man would seem to succeed, at another time another. But the mind of man has no faculty for settling such questions with certainty or finality. All human minds, even the most brilliant, are capable of error. One mind is better than another, but none is perfect; and if any one mind were perfect, the minds of other men would not be perfect enough to know it. If God had given men a deposit of truth and left it to their mercy, there would soon have been no certainty of truth left in the world. But there are truths about which it is vital that certainty should be possible; since this certainty cannot be provided by man. God saw to it.

That is the whole point of the doctrine of infallibility. It is important to be clear on this. God made His Church infallible. In one sense it is surprising to see how little this means, yet how totally effective this little is. When we say the Church is infallible, we mean the Bishops, for they are in the fullest sense successors of the Apostles and their infallibility means simply this: that whatever is taught as to the revelation of Christ by the Bishops of the Church cannot be wrong: God will not allow it. This does not mean that each individual Bishop is prevented by God from teaching error, or that particular groups of Bishops in this or that place might not teach error; but that when any teaching is so widely given by the Bishops of the Church that we can say it is the teaching of the episcopate, then we can know that that teaching is true. If they teach that something is so, it is so. If they teach that something is false, it is false. And this not by their power, but by God's power.

Yet a situation might arise in which it would be difficult to tell with certainty what the common teaching of the episcopate throughout the world actually is. It might be a matter of some problem in theology newly posed and too urgent to be left to the sieve of theological discussion. One way or another the occasion might arise where a definite statement of truth, a statement which is certainly true, is needed, and there is dispute or doubt as to what the episcopate throughout the world teaches upon the matter. This is the normal ground of action for the infallibility of the Pope. Just as the Apostles had their successors, the Bishops, so Peter has his successor, the Bishop of Rome: for Rome was Peter's own See. And the Pope is endowed with that same infallibility with which God has endowed the Church. Thus it is one and the same infallibility whereby God safeguards the Bishops as a body and the Bishop of Rome as head of the body from teaching error to His Church. There is no question of inspiration. God does not promise the Pope some special message or illumination. The Pope must learn his doctrine like anyone else. No hidden source of doctrine is available to him that is not available to any other citizen of the kingdom. But God sees to it that when the Pope gives the whole Church a definition of faith or morals bearing upon the revelation of Christ, there will be no error in it. If the Pope defines that a thing is so, it is so. If he defines that it is false, it is false.

As we have seen, this is a tiny almost penurious gift. In a sense, it gives nothing at all. By his infallibility, the Pope acquires no truth. The truth that he infallibly teaches he had to acquire in the ordinary way of learning with ordinary or extraordinary effort. Infallibility does not account for any of the truth that is in his definition; it accounts only for the absence of all the error that might have been in his definition. In the struggle of the human mind for more light, infallibility, whether of Church or Pope, saves the mind no trouble, does for the mind nothing that the mind can do for itself. What it does do is to guarantee the mind's true findings and to reject its false findings. The result is that the thinker can have all the luxury of thinking, yet the truth is safe: the flock of Christ is fed and there is no poison in the food.

Infallibility is God's device to make it possible for the human mind to exercise its activity upon His revelation without destroying the revelation in the process. Grasp that the preservation of what God has revealed is the primary thing, incomparably more important than any conceivable mental activity— because the revelation provides truth which man must have in order to live intelligently, yet cannot find for himself. One way of preserving the truth would have been to give it to man as a set body of formulas, not to be discussed or subjected to the mind's action, but simply to be learned and repeated. The result would have been some sort of stagnation and sterilization. The mind is so constituted that it cannot get much use out of what it cannot think about. Such a system would have preserved revealed truth from the adulteration of error, but would have reduced its fruitfulness for living almost to nothing.

Man being what he is, he could not be given truths to live by but not think about. Mental activity upon the revelation of God there has to be. But as we have seen logically and historically, mental activity without the safeguard of an infallible teacher could have led only to chaos. The Bible, written by men under the inspiration of God, is a marvellous repository of God's revelation, but it cannot defend itself. If men differ as to what any one of its teachings may mean, it cannot intervene to settle the difference. The process terminates in chaos, and chaos is no terminus. One might be disposed to think that this is too gloomy a view. Free inquiry and free discussion with no safeguarding infallibility have not produced chaos in the physical sciences: why should they be more destructive in religion? But if they have not produced actual chaos they have at least produced multitudinous error long reigning and only slowly corrected: and as often as not the correction turns out to be only an error in a different direction. This is tolerable in the physical sciences, but not in religion: for the truths of religion are the indispensable minimum that man needs to live by. And there is a further consideration. The errors of science tend to correct themselves because experience provides certain tests by which false theories are shown to be false. But with religion the decisive testing takes place after death where we upon earth cannot see it.

Revelation and mental activity can be reconciled only by infallibility. It could of course, had God so willed it, have been a personal infallibility whereby God acted upon the soul of each Christian to prevent his arriving at error as a fruit of his thinking upon revelation. It could have been. But quite evidently it has not been, since outside the Church there is hardly agreement upon any single point of Christ's revelation; and in any event Christ made a different arrangement— an arrangement which, on the principle of leaving men to do as much as possible for themselves, with God supplying only what men cannot supply, is at once an indispensable minimum yet totally effective.

One fact at least is clear, and for a Christian should be decisive. Given that there is immense difference of opinion upon the meaning of every teaching Christ gave, there is no way of settling the difference, that is there is no way of knowing with certainty what Christ means, unless there is here upon earth a living teacher who can settle it without the possibility of error. No other way is even suggested for attaining certainty as to what Christ meant. And what He meant is what matters.
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III

Truth is the one great gift Christ gives us through His Church. Life is the other. There is the same close correspondence with human nature, both in the way life works in us when we have it and the channels through which it comes to us. What this super-natural life of sanctifying grace is we have already seen in some detail and will later see in even more detail. We need only summarize here. In order to live the life of Heaven for which man is destined, he needs new powers of knowing and loving in his soul over and above the natural powers of his intellect and will. Therefore a new life principle, a new principle of operation, must be given to his soul. Though this new life is meant primarily to enable him to live in Heaven, it is given to him while he is still upon earth, and its acquisition and preservation is man's principal business on earth. And if it does not yet have its full flowering in the direct vision of God, its effect upon the soul is still very great. It elevates the intellect to the level of faith and the will to the levels of hope and charity. It is not a gift given once for all. It may be lost and restored. What is more vital, it may be increased. While we live there is no limit to the possibility of the growth of this life in us. It is indeed a result of the energizing of God's life in our souls; and precisely because God's life is infinite, there is no limit to the increase of its energizing in us, save the limit of our willingness to lay ourselves open to it.

Of how sanctifying grace operates in the soul and of the part played by actual grace and of the difference between the two we shall speak in the third part of this book. Here we are concerned with the way in which Christ uses the Church to give sanctifying grace to us.

We have already seen that Christ meant the life to come to us in Baptism— we are to be born again of water and the Holy Ghost. We have seen that we cannot have life in us unless we eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood: and we have seen how this could be, for at the Last Supper He changed bread into His body and wine into His blood and gave them to the Apostles, at the same time giving the Apostles the command, and therefore the power, to do likewise for us. We have seen how He gave the Apostles the power to forgive sins, that is to restore life to the soul which by sin has lost it: and since the power to forgive was accompanied by the power to withhold forgiveness, the minister of the power must be told what the sin was— so that the restoration of life was made consequent upon the material action by which one man told another his sins. Baptism and Eucharist and Forgiveness we see in the Gospels. When we come to the earliest days of the Church in action, we find another way by which life is given: Is one of you sick? Let him send for the presbyters of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the Lord's name. Prayer offered in faith will restore the sick man, and the Lord will give him relief; if he is guilty of sins, they will be pardoned. (James v.14.)

Two other ways we also find used by the Apostles which clearly they had been taught to do by Christ. There is the appointment of successors, for as we have seen they were to have successors until the end of time with the same powers as they to convey Christ's gifts to the souls of men. The New Testament story of the early Church is filled with the accounts of this communication of priestly power, and always in the same way, by the imposition of hands. We may notice one example: St. Paul writes to Timothy: A special grace has been entrusted to thee; prophecy awarded it, and the imposition of the presbyters' hands went with it. (i Tim.iv.14.)

And there is another imposing of hands short of the com-munication of the priesthood by which men receive the Holy Ghost. It is the sacrament we have come to call Confirmation. There is an example in St. Paul's action in Ephesus (Acts xix.1-6).

These six then— Baptism, Penance, Blessed Eucharist, Confirmation, Holy Orders and Last Anointing— are evident from Scripture; and there is enough in Scripture to prepare our minds for the Church's statement that there was a seventh sacrament, established like these by Christ, the sacrament of Matrimony. What is to be noted in all seven is the combination of the spiritual gift with some material thing used as the vehicle by which the gift is brought to us. We have bread and water and wine and oil and the imposition of hands and the utterance of our sin and the union of a man and woman. Here again we must notice that God is treating man according to what man is. We have already seen that because man is a social being God has made a social religion for him. We see now that because man is a union of spirit and matter. God treats him as both. The sacraments are a union of spirit and matter. Naturally: because they are God's approach to man, and that is what man is. A religion which took no proper account of man's body and left it inactive and unsanctified would be as monstrous as a religion which left out of account his essential relation with his fellows. Religion is the act of man—the whole man, soul and body. It is not the act of the soul only, for man is not only soul: it is his very raison d'etre to be not only soul. The body is not as important as the soul, in life generally or in religion; but it is as truly part of man as the soul is, and has a real part to play both in life generally and in religion.

The supernatural does not ignore the natural or substitute something else for it. It is built upon or built into the natural. Sanctifying grace does not provide us with a new soul, it enters into the soul we already have. Nor does it give the soul new faculties, but elevates the faculties that are already there, giving intellect and will new powers of operation. God as Sanctifier does not destroy or bypass the work of God as Creator. What God has created. God sanctifies. All this means that the more fully man is man, the better his nature serves for the supernatural that is to be built upon it. Whatever damages man as man damages him in his religious relation to God. His integrity as man requires a proper balance between spirit and matter; and he finds this proper balance at once appallingly difficult to keep and calamitous to lose. If the body becomes dominant, he is in danger of becoming a beast. But for spiritual men there is another danger— a spiritual pride leading to contempt for the body which can bring them pretty close to the Devil.

The sacramental principle, continually reminding man of his body will keep his feet firmly upon the ground and destroy pride in its strongest root, sanctifying his body will make it the fit partner of a soul indwelt by God.

The giving of supernatural life by way of sacrament, then, corresponds with the structure of man. Observe, too, how precisely this particular system of sacraments corresponds with the shape of man's natural life. Ordinarily we can count upon four determining points in human life: a man is born and a man dies: in between he grows up and he marries— or if he be a Catholic he may choose the direct ministry of God. For these four points with their five possibilities there are five sacraments. A man is reborn by Baptism by which he gets a place in the Kingdom; for his growing out of childhood there is Confirmation by which he gets a function in the Kingdom; for marriage there is Matrimony, for ministry there is Holy Orders, this latter bringing a fuller function in the Kingdom; for death there is the Last Anointing. As life flows normally from one point to the next, there are two other needs, for daily bread and for healing in sickness. In the supernatural life there are sacraments for these two, completing the seven. The Blessed Eucharist provides our daily bread, the sacrament of Penance our healing in the soul's sickness.

Let us glance for a long moment at one of the Sacraments. The Blessed Eucharist obviously differs from the others in this— that whereas by the others we receive life from Christ, by the Blessed Eucharist we receive Christ Himself. The others all lead to increase of life, but the Blessed Eucharist is the basis of them all, for it is the very food of the soul and without food there can be no continuance in life. The other sacraments, so to speak, take the Blessed Eucharist for granted. Baptism is a preparation for it and so in another way is Penance. The others develop its possibilities.

Observe how the life of the early Church, as we see it in the Acts of the Apostles, is filled with it. At the Last Supper Our Lord took bread, and gave thanks, and broke it, and said. "Take, eat; this is My Body which is to be given up for you. Do this for a commemoration of Me." And so with the cup, when supper was ended. "This cup", He said, "is the New Testament, in My blood. Do this whenever you drink it, for a commemoration of Me. (l Cor.xi.24-25).

He had changed bread into His body so that it was no longer bread, though it had all the appearances and properties of bread, but was really His Body; and so with the wine. And He had told the Apostles: Do this for a commemoration of Me.

The this which they were to do in commemoration of Him was the thing that He had done: that is they, too, were to change bread so that it was no longer bread but the body of Our Lord and wine so that it was no longer wine but the blood of Our Lord: and Christians were to receive Our Lord's body and blood from their hands as they from Christ's hands. Is not this cup we bless a participation in Christ's blood? Is not the bread we break a participation in Christ's body? (l Cor.x.16.)

St. Paul insists most urgently upon the reality of what we receive. Whosoever shall eat this bread, or drink the chalice of the Lord unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and of the blood of the Lord. (l Cor. xi. 27.)

It is, of course, the living Christ whom we thus receive. The bread ceases to be bread and becomes His body. But because death has no more dominion over Him, where His body is, there He wholly is, body and blood and soul and divinity. The wine ceases to be wine and becomes His blood: but where His blood is, there He wholly is, body and blood and soul and divinity. Therefore if we receive either, we are receiving the whole Christ. And receive Him we must, for He is the food of our life.
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IV

That the Kingdom should have teachers and ministers of the sacraments is obviously necessary; for till the end of time men will need Christ's gifts of truth and life, and He has chosen to dispense them through men. That the Kingdom should have priests is not at first so obvious. For Christ, our High Priest, has offered the totally effective sacrifice and it cannot be added to. Yet priests there are and a continuance of sacrifice. Clearly if there are priests and a sacrifice they will be men through whom Christ is offering sacrifice, just as it is He Who is teaching through the teachers and giving life through the ministers of the sacraments. The teachers of the Church are not adding to His teaching; the ministers are dispensing no life but His; the priests are offering no new sacrifice.

Observe how St. John insists both upon the unique priesthood of Christ Our Lord, and upon the continuance of sacrifice in Christ's Kingdom: Thou wast slain in sacrifice; out of every tribe, every language, every people, every nation Thou hast ransomed us with thy blood and given us to God. Thou hast made us a royal race of priests, to serve God; we shall reign as kings over the earth. (Apoc.v.9-10.)

That it should be so the prophets had already told. Isaias (xvi.21), telling how the Kingdom that was to be should contain the Gentiles in great numbers, adds: I will take of them to be priests and Levites, saith the Lord; and of the Sacrifice that is to be, we read in the Prophet Malachias. The Lord, having rebuked the priests of Israel for the way in which they are offering sacrifice, goes on: I have no pleasure in you, and I will not receive a gift of your hand for from the rising of the sun even to the going down, My name is great among the Gentiles, and in every place there is sacrifice and there is offered to My name a clean oblation. (Mal.i.11.)

We shall come a little later to discuss the Sacrifice of the Mass— wherein those who change this bread and wine into Christ's Body and Blood offer Him thus wholly present to His Father in Heaven. This is the clean oblation offered from the rising of the sun even to the going down in a vaster world than Malachias' readers knew of.
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V

To know the Church of Christ it is not sufficient to analyse the phrases in which Christ stated His design for it. We must study it in its actuality, as history shows it. That study can be a startling and even a shattering experience. The heavenly Jerusalem so often looks a very earthly Jerusalem. At one time or another the citizens of the Kingdom have practised every sort of abomination; and not the citizens only, but the successors of the Apostles and even the successors of Peter himself. The study, I say, can be shattering. Yet not to make the study dooms one to an incomprehension of what was in the mind of Christ. To make it brings us to a very deep level of understanding of the nature of the human society here upon earth through which Christ has chosen to live and operate in His followers.

The society is a true human society. From this fact flow two consequences, the first easy to grasp, the other not so easy. First, a society of men, in order to be a society and not a rabble, has to have officials and they have to have authority. Christ has given His society officials with authority. It is through them that He gives the gifts of life and truth and preserves the unity of the society. As ultimate custodians of the sacraments which convey the life, and the teachings which convey the truth, and ultimate authority for the preservation of unity, Christ uses the Pope. Observe that all these gifts come through the society not from it. They are from Christ, and their value is from Him, not from the society through which He has chosen to give them— through which He has guaranteed to give them. For these specified purposes, the officials (the Pope included) represent Christ. And so far as they represent Christ, there is no defect in them.

No error is given to us as truth, the sacraments retain their integrity. Outside their representative capacity, the officials (the Pope included) are simply themselves and must answer to God for their conduct like anyone else. The gifts we get from God through them in their representative capacity are so enormous in value that it would be a kind of frivolity in us to object that we do not always approve of them personally: and, in any event, once we are sure that God has chosen to use them, it would be sheer impertinence to suggest to God that He should give us gifts so vast in some other way.

This is logically inescapable, but it leaves us with a troubling doubt. Would God be likely to use as His representatives, even for limited purposes, some of the men whom we find as priests or bishops or Popes in His Church? The answer lies in what I have called the second and less easily graspable consequence of the Church's nature as a true human society, a society of men. Men do not become saints just by entering it: on the contrary their whole life in it is meant to be a striving towards sanctity. Further, men do not cease to be men by entering it. They retain their free will and the capacity to fix their will upon any object that seems to them desirable. Thus at any moment the human society, the Church upon earth, consists of millions of souls at various stages on the road that leads to sanctity. Some have attained it, but must still struggle to remain in it; some are close to it, some not so close, some seem to have given up the struggle, some even seem to be headed viciously away from it. That is the reality of the human society at any given time. It is made up, in a proportion that changes from moment to moment, of men headed for Heaven, men headed for Hell, and men apparently not headed anywhere. And it is through this society that Christ is operating.

He guarantees that the truth and the life and the unity shall not fail. But he fulfils His guarantee without doing violence either to the nature of man or to the nature of human society. Having chosen to act upon men through a society of men, Christ is faithful to the logic of His choice. The men remain men; the society remains a society of men. They do glorious things, they do ghastly things.

It is the especial meaning of the Church that in it Our Lord unites men to Himself through humanity— not through some ideal humanity, but through the humanity, good, bad and indifferent, that actually exists. Catholics do not run to a type: as Matthew Arnold noted, they suggest all the pell mell of the men and women of Shakespeare's plays.

There is a certain kind of spiritual man who finds all this intolerable. His every instinct is revolted at the thought of Christ's working in and through, and of himself being sanctified in and through, this mixed crowd of human beings. The hot smell of humanity is too strong for him. He would have his own direct relation with God, excluding the turbulence of humanity; or he would make his own choice of the men he feels God would choose. But this is preciousness and folly. It is as though the man Christ healed by the touch of His spittle had asked to be healed some other way— he was a refined man, perhaps, brought up to regard spittle as vulgar, or even unhygienic. One cannot be thus delicate about the gifts of God. Personally I like the company I find in the Church enormously. If another man dislikes it, that is his privilege. We do not join the Church for the company, but for the gifts.

There is a thorough-going democracy about salvation. Most people get into the Kingdom by being born of citizens, and what could be less exclusive than that; there is no way of testing babies for their fitness to be Catholics. Those who join later in life have to pass no intelligence test, or character test either. Provided they know what the Church is and still wish to join her they are admitted, whatever their defects of intelligence or virtue. The plain truth is that Christ has chosen to unite to Himself and work through not an elite but an utterly unexclusive free-for-all cross-section of humanity. He solicits it, aids it, showers gifts upon it, but He does not force it. It responds to Him as the individuals in it will, sometimes better, sometimes worse. It acts according to what, by the measure of its co-operation with His gifts, it is. He does not " interfere " with it beyond what is necessary to carry out His guarantee that the truth and the life and the unity shall abide in it. Thus He does not appoint the officials after the first. He does not even appoint the Pope. He has left the Church of Rome, meaning by that the Church in the Diocese of Rome, to choose its own rulers. The mode of election has varied from time to time, but at all times the human electors have been true electors, unforced by God. He has chosen to let them choose. The Cardinals pray to the Holy Ghost for guidance in this, as Christians pray for guidance in every action; and according to the sincerity and integrity of the prayer it is answered: no less: no more.

This being so, anyone who knows what Europe has been like in the nineteen centuries of the Church's existence would be prepared for anything in the characters of the Popes. And that is just about what he will find. Anything. Everything. The electors choose their man. He is consecrated Bishop of Rome. God makes him infallible— which is to say that God will not let him teach the Church anything that is erroneous— and so safeguards his office. But the man himself remains a man. He has his own soul to save and his own struggle to save it, like any other Catholic. Being Pope does not of itself help him in the struggle. There is no guarantee that he will save his soul even: for the Pope is a man, and men do not get that guarantee. The only guarantee is that he will not teach the Church error, that the gifts of Life and Truth, of which it is his office to be custodian upon earth, shall not fail. The office of Pope is not for the advantage of the Pope, it is for the advantage of the Society.

This twofold nature of the Church— a society of human beings, Christ operating in it and through it— presents the same kind of puzzle and indeed scandal to the onlooker as the twofold nature of Christ Himself— a true human nature assumed and made His own by a Person of divine nature. The puzzle is a sort of double effect. Looking at Christ, bleeding, thirsting and dying, the onlooker would feel certain that here was a mere man with the limitations of a man. Seeing Him raising others from the dead and Himself raised, he would feel that this must be God. How could He be both? There is a similar double effect with the Church. In so far as it is Christ Himself living in men— for the teaching of truth, for the promulgation of the moral law, for the life-giving work of the sacraments— it is perfect. Apart from the field of operations thus safeguarded by the Founder, the Church's actions and policies will be affected by the limitations and imperfections of its human members. That first field is all that God has promised; and it is tremendous. If He gives more, that is over and above the bargain. We are not entitled to expect it. That He does give more there can be no doubt: it would be hard to follow the Church's history without the recurrent feeling that we are in the presence of something more than human, something that human powers and purposes cannot wholly explain, some intervention of God over and above the strict terms of the guarantee.

Consider now, not the whole vast section of humanity that constitutes the Church upon earth, but the men chosen out of it to be Popes. I have said that you will find anything and everything in the Popes— pretty well every sin, pretty well every virtue that is to be found among men in general. But in what proportion? To me it seems that the mass of sheer sanctity and sheer human greatness is immeasurably beyond any human average, the number of "unworthy" Popes (even by the most hostile judgment) tiny in proportion to the whole number. This of course is only a personal impression. Another man might feel quite differently. But in either event it is not of the essence. Our Faith is rooted in Christ, not in the human instruments He uses. In a given age a Catholic might revere the reigning Pope and rejoice in his policies, and this would be an extra stimulation. On the other hand, he might find the Pope's life disedifying or his policies unpleasing: and this would be depressing. But whether the Pope's personality and policy stimulate him or depress him, the substance of our Catholicity is something distinct from them: what primarily matters is what we find in the Church of which the Pope is the earthly ruler— the grace of the Sacraments, the offering of the Sacrifice, the certitude of the Truth, the unity of the Fellowship, and Christ in Whom all these are.

Much of what I have said about the Popes could be said as truly about the mass of Catholics. Every sin that is found outside the Church will be found inside, but the proportion of virtue to sin— if there were any way of measuring such things for statistical purposes— would I think be found to be very different. An individual Catholic might very well be less pleasing to God than an individual non-Catholic. But the overall picture would not be the same. All that stream of truth and grace flowing through every channel that Christ made to carry the flow to men's souls does not go for nothing. But if we want to form to ourselves some notion of the richness of the stream, we must look not at Catholics who make no use of it, nor even at good average Catholics, but at the Saints. If you want to know how wet the rain is, do not judge by someone who went out into it with an umbrella. Most of us are like that in relation to the shower of truth and life. We do not give ourselves to it wholly, but set up all sorts of pathetic protections against the terrifying downrush of it. But the Saints have gone out into it stripped. There, but for resistance to the grace of God, goes every one of us.
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