Page:Adams - Australian Essays.djvu/134

118 They all began to laugh.

"Ah," said Maddock, "I was right when, even while thanking you, Sir Horace, I thought to myself: Timeo Danaos, et dona ferentes."

"The Christianity of the Future," Gildea proceeded gravely, "lies, I believe, in two transformations—in Catholicism learning that its kingdom is not of this world, that it no longer requires a Pope, a Rome, as a Palladium whereby it may fight; in a word, in learning the lesson of Protestantism, of Freedom: and in Protestantism doing the converse, and absorbing into itself the catholic Faith, the catholic Poetry!"

"And what are the Secularists going to do in your Future?" asked Hawkesbury, "are Messrs. Arnold and Huxley to be put up on a shelf in your spiritual Museum, in two large spirit bottles, labelled respectively 'Culture' and 'Science?

"Culture," answered Gildea, "is, after all, but Secular Catholicism, just as Science is but Secular Protestantism. They too will each learn their lesson of the other."

"Humph!" said Maddock, who again had a faint suspicion that Gildea was mocking, "and so, after all, Sir Horace is an optimist."

"We do not lay stress," Fitzgerald said gently, "on the temporal power of the Holy Father. As Sir Horace implied, this temporal power was once the one shining light in a chaotic world, and it was well that it should be set on a hill. But now the light is diffusing itself. It is our wish that, as the Vatican Œcumenical Council declared: 'Intelligence, Knowledge, and Wisdom may grow and perfect themselves—as much with the mass as with individuals, with one man as with the whole church!' We are no foes to Freedom. What we are foes to, is Anarchy! At the Reformation you gave the right of deciding on the deepest religious questions to every ignorant man that chose to discuss them, and the seamless robe of Christianity was rent into a hundred pieces! Look at all these miserable little protestant sects and sub-sects, Plymouth Brethren, Primitive Methodists, Ana-baptists, and I know not what noisy, ignorant fanatics. At the Revolution, you did the same for social questions, and what is the result? The Dynamiters of Russia, of Germany, of Ireland, initiated by what you, Dr. Maddock, so well call 'such gentleness as was revealed in the diabolical deeds of the Commune,'—to say nothing of those of the Reign of Terror."