bt true; but it is
not true of the orthodoxy of Catholicism. There is no point, probably,
connected with this question, about which the general world is so
misinformed and ignorant, as the sober but boundless charity of what it
calls the anathematising Church. So little indeed is this charity
understood generally, that to assert it seems a startling paradox. Most
paradoxes are doubtless in reality the lies they at first sight seem to
be; but not so this one. It is the simple statement of a fact. Never was
there a religious body, except the Roman, that laid the intense stress
she does on all her dogmatic teachings, and had yet the justice that
comes of sympathy for those that cannot receive them. She condemns no
goodness, she condemns even no earnest worship, though it be outside her
pale. On the contrary, she declares explicitly that a knowledge of '_the
one true God, our Creator and Lord_,' may be attained to by the
'_natural light of human reason_,' meaning by '_reason_' faith
unenlightened by revelation; and she declares those to be anathema who
deny this. The holy and humble men of heart who do not know her, or who
in good faith reject her, she commits with confidence to God's
uncovenanted mercies; and these she knows are infinite; but, except as
revealed to her, she can of necessity say nothing distinct about them.
It is admitted by the world at large, that of her supposed bigotry she
has no bitterer or more extreme exponents than the Jesuits; and this is
what a Jesuit theologian says upon this matter: '_A heretic, so long as
he believes his sect to be more or equally deserving of belief, has no
obligation to believe the Church ... [and] when men who have been
brought up in heresy, are persuaded from boyhood that we impugn and
attack the word of God, that we are idolaters, pestilent deceivers, and
are therefore to be shunned as pestilence, they cannot, while this
persuasion lasts, with a safe conscience hear us._'[42] Thus for those
without her the Church has one condemnation only. Her anathemas are on
none but those who reject her with their eyes open, by tampering with a
conviction that she really is the truth. These are condemned, not for
not seeing that the teacher is true, but because having really seen
this, they continue to close their eyes to it. They will not obey when
they know they ought to obey. And thus the moral offence of a Catholic
in denying some recondite doctrine, does not lie merely, and need not