Chapter I

1. By the term “The Church” I mean the Catholic Church; and by the Catholic Church I mean that visible society real, one, and clearly present before the world to-day, which is in communion with the Apostolic See of Rome, and accepts not only the supremacy of that see but also the Infallibility of its occupant when, as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, and speaking in that capacity, he defines a matter in faith or morals.

2. The Church claims Divine Authority. She says:

“I alone know fully and teach those truths essential to the life and final happiness of the soul. I alone am that Society wherein the human spirit reposes in its native place; for I alone stand in the centre whence all is seen in proportion and whence the chaotic perspective of things falls into right order. Mankind cannot feed upon itself--for that is death at last. I alone provide external sustenance from that which made mankind. The soil of my country alone can fully nourish mankind. Here, in me, alone is reality. For I alone am not man-made but am of direct divine foundation and am by my divine Founder perpetually maintained.”

3. Against this claim many forms of rejection are found, each with its type of argument: as, that the claim conflicts with the ascertained results of Physical Science: that it advances a particular affirmation not based on the only proofs admissible by reason: that the objector discovers in the Church not the marks of holiness which should accompany such a claim, but rather of evil, etc.

Among the chief objections is the objection from History. It is affirmed that the records of the past, the better they are known and the more closely they are examined, make the more certainly for the rejection of the Church’s claim to Divine Authority, to unique inspiration. These records (it is affirmed) show the Church to be of merely human origin. They yield manifold evidence that illusion, myth and even craft have built up her structure. Her rites are of the kind imagined by men in all ages and places wherever men have abandoned themselves to emotional images divorced from reason. Her doctrines are spun out of nothingness by men engaged upon mere systems invented to explain irrational statements. Her objects of worship are but projections of the worshipper’s mind and have no real existence.

History, it is said, can prove all this. We can trace illusion growing from step to step: the mythical and legendary gradually accepted for fact; the doubtful, vague, uncertain, tentative dream hardening into fixed and absurd dogma. Supposed contemporary evidence, enlightened History with modern apparatus, proved to be subsequent interpolations. The writings traditionally ascribed to witnesses turn out--under the examination of History--to be of a very different and later date. Beyond all this and clinching the argument is the discovery through History that men have always thus created for themselves wholly fanciful beings whom they have worshipped always in much the same fashions. There has been a long process of self-deception from which humanity in its advance is gradually freeing itself, and in this process the Catholic Church is but the last phase.

It is this objection, the argument from History, that I propose to refute. Certain other of the main objections--the objection from Reason, the objection from Philosophy, the objection from Physical Science--are dealt with in other works in this series. I am dealing with the historical objection alone. I propose to show, not that History may convince any man of the Church’s claim, but that the supposed argument from History against that claim has failed. I propose to enquire upon the validity of the objection from History.