Foreword 4 Monsignor Hugh Benson. 6 Infallibility and Tradition. 35
The Death-beds of "Bloody Mary" and "Good Queen Bess." 61
"Christian Science." 77 Spiritualism. 96 Catholicism. 119
Catholicism and the Future. 152 The Conversion of England. 170 In
almost any piece of continuous history there are moments at which
the student has an almost free choice as to how he shall interpret
the facts, this way or that. For research is worth little until an
interpretation of and a verdict upon the evidence are possible.
Every now and then, these are exceptionally important and
exceptionally difficult to read. Thus: Can the gulf between the
thought of Christ and that of His first evangelists and apostles be
bridged? Is the Church of 150 A.D. organically continuous with that
of the Apostles? Such questions as these are vital to one who would
decide what he must "think of Christ." Perhaps in all cases the
answer is best given under the strong impulse of God's grace.
Still, human words can help. For Mgr. Benson, the crucial points,
at which he believed himself able to help, were not those which we
have mentioned, but certain "moments" connected with the position
of St. Peter and the Pope, with the crisis of the Reformation, and
with the relation of modern religious instinct with the unseen
world. Infallibility and Tradition was a topic which from the
beginning had preoccupied him. Mr. Spencer Jones, under whose
auspices his paper was read, had, years before, helped Hugh Benson
not a little towards submission to the Infallible See. Queens Mary
and Elizabeth stand almost as symbols of the acceptance or
rejection of that See: Benson puts before you their Death-beds, and
leaves you to interpret his picture of those meaningful and yet
mysterious moments in our history. In Christian Science and
Spiritualism he examines two modern manifestations of that strange
tendency which drives men, despite themselves, to reach out beyond
the materialistic world, into the unseen, and he unhesitatingly
condemns these two systems as frivolous, dangerous, and degrading.
To whom then shall we go? Back to that Catholicism which includes
all that Christ taught; that Queen Mary clung to, finding in it the
happiness which Elizabeth had lost; and all that the modern
spiritistic methods offer and do not give. To Catholicism, he
argues in yet another pamphlet, belongs the Future; to Catholicism
England, in particular, he avers, must, if she is to keep any
Christianity, receive Conversion. In this group, then, of reprinted
pamphlets is to be found one expression of the scheme into which
Mgr. Benson's outlook fitted itself. It is again and again true
that, starting with Christianity as the Revelation of God, he could
see no form anywhere save the Catholic into which it could
intelligibly place itself. Since then Christianity, he believed, is
immortal, to the Catholics belong the future -- even as they have
possessed the past, and educated Europe into all that is best and
truest in the present. C.C. MARTINDALE. Easter, 1916.
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