I am and have none other." And Christ said: "Father, forgive
them, for they know not what they do," and there is no man who perhaps
knows what he does. But it has been necessary, for the benefit of the
social order, to convert religion into a kind of police system, and
hence hell. Oriental or Greek Christianity is predominantly
eschatological, Protestantism predominantly ethical, and Catholicism is
a compromise between the two, although with the eschatological element
preponderating. The most authentic Catholic ethic, monastic asceticism,
is an ethic of eschatology, directed to the salvation of the individual
soul rather than to the maintenance of society. And in the cult of
virginity may there not perhaps be a certain obscure idea that to
perpetuate ourselves in others hinders our own personal perpetuation?
The ascetic morality is a negative morality. And, strictly, what is
important for a man is not to die, whether he sins or not. It is not
necessary to take very literally, but as a lyrical, or rather
rhetorical, effusion, the words of our famous sonnet--

_No me mueve, mi Dios, para quererte
el cielo que me tienes prometido,_[20]

and the rest that follows.

The real sin--perhaps it is the sin against the Holy Ghost for which
there is no remission--is the sin of heresy, the sin of thinking for
oneself. The saying has been heard before now, here in Spain, that to be
a liberal--that is, a heretic--is worse than being an assassin, a thief,
or an adulterer. The gravest sin is not to obey the Church, whose
infallibility protects us from reason.

And why be scandalized by the infallibility of a man, of the Pope? What
difference does it make whether it be a book that is infallible--the
Bible, or a society of men--the Church, or a single man? Does it make
any essential change in the rational difficulty? And since the
infallibility of a book or of a society of men is not more rational than
that of a single man, this supreme offence in the eyes of reason had to
be posited.

It is the vital asserting itself, and in order to assert itself it
creates, with the help of its enemy, the rational, a complete dogmatic
structure, and this the Church defends against rationalism, against
Protestantism, and against Modernism. The Church defends life. It stood
up against Galileo, and it did right; for his discovery, in its
inception and until it became assimilated to the general body of human
knowledge, tended to shatter the a