Page:The Catholic Church and Conversion - G. K. Chesterton.pdf/20

16 CATHOLIC CHURCH AND CONVERSION not necessarily owe anything to tradition. In places where tradition can do nothing for it, in places where all the tradition is against it, it is intruding on its own merits; not as a tradition but a truth. The father of some such Anglican or American Puritan family will find, very often, that all his children are breaking away from his own more or less Christian compromise (regarded as normal in the nineteenth century) and going off in various directions after various faiths or fashions which he would call fads. One of his sons will become a Socialist and hang up a portrait of Lenin; one of his daughters will become a Spiritualist and play with a planchette; another daughter will go over to Christian Science and it is quite likely that an other son will go over to Rome. The point is, for the moment, that from the point of view of the father , and even in a sense of the family , all these things act after the manner of new religions ,

of great movements, of enthusiasms that carry young people off their feet and leave older people bewildered or annoyed. Catholicism indeed, even more than the others, is often spoken of as if it were actually one of the wild passions of youth. Optimistic aunts and uncles say that the youth will “ get over it ," as if it were a childish love affair or that unfortunate business with the barmaid . Darker and sterner aunts and uncles, perhaps at a rather earlier period , used actually to talk about it as an indecent indulgence, as if its literature were literally a sort of pornography . Newman remarks