an infallible guide to truth, truth is impossible. He must be aware that the Catholic mind itself has been widely at variance as to the relations of free will and election, and equally aware that Spinoza has advanced a singularly plausible ground for doing away with arbitrary freedom altogether. He would be merely obscurantist if he refused to listen to these other voices simply because they upset him. He must concede them a hearing, and he must allow at least the possibility that they have spoken better than all the doctors of the Church.

Even the claims of the natural scientists cannot wholly be ignored, shallow as much of their philosophy may be. The Church itself teaches that God has established rules for the government of the universe. The presence of a body of divine revelation testifying to a considerable number of highly improbable exceptions to those rules, all occurring at a remote period of time for the benefit of an obscure Semitic tribe, is not wholly reassuring. Neither is the cure of pathological conditions by apparent miracles. Neither is the liquefaction of the blood of Saint Januarius. The Catholic is of course aware of all the conditions which surround these difficulties to prevent them from being insuperable, but this does not keep them from torturing him and disturbing his intellectual peace. Despite all the faulty reasoning of mechanists and biologists, too, and despite the tragic misunderstanding of the character of the book of Genesis, no believer can rest wholly easy upon some sublime assumption that everything can be explained away, and that there is no conflict between science and religion as to the creation of the human race or the operation of the human soul.

If we turn to the field of history, the position of the Catholic is no less

unhappy. The Church tells him that its whole existence rests upon the. rational credibility of the Gospel narratives. Their historicity can only be accepted on the grounds upon which any document is granted historical worth. Yet this raises innumerable problems of criticism. Under his ordinary canons, for example, the historian must suspect the authentic character of any document which records the marvelous. The Gospels are strewn with the marvelous. Under his ordinary canons the report of words which the very text shows no one could have heard must be gravely suspect. What, then, of the prayer of Christ in the Garden? Nor is the Catholic unaware of the more intricate studies of the so-called higher critics, the grave questions as to authorship which they have raised, and the resultant doubts as to the historical weight of the writings themselves.

When the Russian communists declare that religion is the opium of the people, the Catholic who has studied his economics can scarcely afford to laugh that savage axiom away. Religion is an opiate in a certain sense. It does encourage the poor and downtrodden to remain as they are, to make no effort to improve their worldly estate, by lulling them into the hope of happiness after death to be secured by patience, by endurance of wrong and poverty and tyranny. It is to the interest, then, of the exploiting class to inculcate Christian principles among the exploited in order to create celestial values for which they will be content to surrender the more substantial terrestrial ones. The Catholic may know in his heart that this is only an accidental coincidence, that the goods of this world are nothing, that the rich, though they are Satan's minions, are nevertheless doing God's work by keeping the poor persuaded of this fact.

He may know this, but it is a hard saying, and he may well ask himself, occasionally, who can abide it.

II

If we leave the problems of a philosophical and scientific order, and turn to those which concern morality, the situation is not greatly improved. To be sure, the Church subscribes to the ordinary ethical principles of Western civilization. But what of some of its doctrines of morality? A boy and a girl passionately in love with each other go before a priest and promise to take each other as man and wife until death separate them. This marriage is held a sacrament, imprinting an irremovable character upon the soul, so that, however impossible their marital relations may become, only death can permit either of them to correct the mistake and seek a more suitable companion through life. Why is it that the death of one person removes an irremovable character? The Catholic may be fully aware of all the arguments of the theologians supporting the position of the Church on these points, but arguments they are likely to remain for him, and little more. He cannot but admit a certain force in the contention of his adversaries.

What of the hard and fast ruling of the Church in regard to birth control? Why this sudden insistence on nature, when man is usually excepted from the order of nature?

There is no need here to labor the so-much-belabored problem of political loyalty and Catholicism. But it is madness to deny the possibility of a conflict between a man's duty as a Catholic and his duty as a citizen. Is it truly moral to embroil a community in civil disorder for the sake of an abstruse point of conscience? Spinoza, for example, would hold that religion is so entirely

spiritual that a conflict is impossible because the State is entitled to compel the body and the lips, but cannot compel the mind. So long as one thinks one's self in harmony with the divine will, one may safely do what one is ordered by competent civil authority. That is manifestly the end of martyrdom, but the blood of the martyrs is the seal of the faith.

Throughout the Catholic world, the credulous are encouraged to honor 'relics' which are not relics, to believe in miracles of which there is no proof, to pay devotion to saints who never existed. The Second Nocturn of the Office of Matins, part of the divine liturgy, has become proverbial even among the clergy for its lies. It matters little that no one is bound to believe these things. The bishops sanction and encourage the teaching of them, and activities on the part of the laity based on the assumption of their truth. Surely there is an intricate bit of moral philosophy involved in this policy one not wholly to be ignored by the conscientious Catholic.

III

There remains a whole group of questions, which can only be adumbrated here, relating to the obvious fact that, whether or not the Church be a divine institution, it is certainly a human one. For example, papal government is far from a self-evident dispensation. Many doctors of the Church have taught that all have taught that all power of government in any society rests in its members. From this they have drawn the conclusion that only a general council, representing all Churchmen, can govern the Church. There is even a case to be made out for Wyclif's dominion of grace with its corollary of government of the Church by civil rulers.

After papal government there is

papal infallibility. The pope is called infallible in faith and morals, but no theologians have decided what papal utterances are infallible; whether bulls, or encyclicals, or decrees of congregations of the Roman Curia enjoy this quality in whole or in part. Morals, too, is a broad word. How much is it supposed to include? If both pope and general council are infallible, has the latter any real power of teaching apart from the former? What of the subjective test of the true faith propounded by Vincent of Lérins that which has been held always, by everybody, everywhere?

What is one to think of sacerdotalism? No one can study church history without recognizing the constant tendency of a professional clergy to identify itself with the Church, and to minimize or ignore the fundamental priesthood of all believers which is implicit in Christian teaching. There is, for example, education, an eminently priestly duty. Yet of necessity the child's first introduction to the Catholic faith comes, not from any priest, but from his mother or his father. If parents are entrusted by God with the sacred duty of imparting the saving knowledge of truth to infant minds, why are they not entrusted with the entire choice of their children's education? Why should they be threatened with excommunication for not choosing to send their children to a school run by priests whose general capacity may be far inferior to that of laymen? What business have priests, whose general formation has been along lines of philosophy and theology, to undertake the teaching of economics, history, biology, and pretend that they can possibly do it as well as lay experts who have devoted their lives to these special sciences?

Consider the government of the parish churches. These are the gifts of the community to God. Yet the

community has no voice in their planning, their management, their decoration, the character of the services held in them. They are built by priests and managed by priests with the money given to priests by devout, industrious, and thrifty layfolk.

Why, year in and year out, are priests allowed to preach heresy and falsehood from their pulpits? The bishop is supposed to be the pastor of his flock. Why is no surveillance exercised in this matter? If the blind lead the blind, both must inevitably fall into the ditch. Why in almost every parish church in the United States are there money-changing tables at the door to aid in the exaction of seating fees when canon law expressly forbids this practice? Why, year after year, is vulgar theatrical polyphonic music allowed in the churches when the saintly Pope Pius X, whom a lipworshiping hierarchy is now trying to canonize, adjured and commanded the churches to return to the Gregorian chant and the dignified polyphony of the sixteenth century? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? If the hierarchy is not obedient, how can it ask obedience of the laity?

IV

Such an ex parte statement of the difficulties which the Catholic mind confronts is of course misleading. I have had occasion to note more than once that valid answers and convincing explanations are readily available in the case of the majority of them. Yet some must remain, in the mind of every Catholic, marshy and dangerous quagmires of thought, which he would willingly sidestep, but in which the bitter requirement of intellectual honesty implicit in his religion compels him to wade.

Why, cries the skeptic, if your mind does not rest in your faith, if your

faith torments, exhausts, even nullifies your mind, why remain a Catholic? This question in a measure overstates the case. The Catholic, like everyone else, is deeply aware of his intellectual limitations. He realizes that, although he thinks he sees a logical lion in the way, it may be only a logical chimæra. He realizes that even the most systematic of philosophers, with or without religious guidance, has never produced a logic-proof system. He knows that there are a host of men living and dead, of far greater intellectual powers than his, who have scaled the dizziest heights of the world of thought without falling into the abyss of unbelief. A common human modesty and self-distrust, then, are his first safeguard.

Secondly, he is aware that very few good things, life itself included, are easy to keep, however easy they be to obtain. It does not follow, of course, that because a thing is hard to keep it is good, but it suggests the general probability of such a converse proposition. If the retention of his faith costs him more suffering than its abandonment, he should be cautious of throwing away the expensive for the cheap. Furthermore, he is cautious of that very cheapness. In many ways he recognizes certain immediate satisfactions to be gained by abandoning his religion. He might be relieved from the clandestine or open persecution which attaches to those who hold it. More subtle temptation, he would be relieved from that mortification of the appetites which it imposes upon him. He would be relieved from the irksome discipline of obedience to social or intellectual inferiors. These and other advantages lead him to suspect that his intellect is not wholly unbiased, that he is deliberately magnifying the problems which trouble him in the hope of finding an excuse for improving his worldly or his sensual position.

Besides, this intellectual crucifixion is so consistent with what his religion teaches him as to the purpose of life that it lends a sort of rational confirmation to his faith. Finding that the Christian life, the imitation of Christ, involves the mortification of the senses and desolation of the spirit, he is hardly surprised that it also includes the anguish of mental uncertainty. For these and for other reasons, perhaps, the Catholic is slow to make any or all of these uncertainties the ground for abandoning his faith.

V

Yet the answer to the skeptic's question lies deeper than words can really express. The only answer may very well be, 'God knows why I remain a Catholic; I don't.' One has been pursued and caught by the Hound of Heaven, and one cannot escape.

But if the full answer either transcends or is unworthy of the words wherein reasonable creatures express themselves upon other topics, there is still one possibility of clarifying the position of the Catholic by an analogy drawn from an experience more generally understood than is the experience of conversion.

Consider a man in love, as the saying goes, with a woman. Every part of the man is involved. His appetitive part desires to possess her. His intellective part drinks in her words, forms concepts of her, imagines or recognizes excellencies in her; and his affective or emotional part is in a condition in her regard not wholly different from that of a devout soul at prayer. Yet his appetitive part is and must be mortified. He can never wholly possess the object of his desire. His affective part is repeatedly afflicted with desolation, for, even if she return his love in equal or in greater degree, he can never know

it for certain. Finally, his intellect is in a torture. His reason will assure him that her possession and her love can do him no good, that he would be better off to forget her and go about his business, that the qualities he has imagined in her do not exist, that she is selfish, cold, and cruel. For all these objections a plausible case may be made out; for some of them he cannot find any answer at all. More than one misogynist has very well asked such

a man, 'Why, if she causes you only mortification, desolation, intellectual torture, do you not cease to be her lover?' Why indeed?

'Lord, I have loved the beauty of Thy house, and the place of Thy glory's habitation,' the Catholic must cry in the end. That house, that place, is the Church Militant. It is a place of suffering, a house of bondage, and yet, because it is the house of the Beloved, it is a house of rest.

Lenox Avenue is for the most part the boulevard of the unperfumed 'rats' they are often termed. Here during certain hours there is nothing unusual in the flashing of knives, the quick succession of pistol shots, the scream of a police whistle or a woman.

But Seventh Avenue is the promenade of high-toned 'dickties' and strivers. It breathes a superior atmosphere, sings superior songs, laughs a superior laugh. Even were there no people, the difference would be clear: the middle of Lenox Avenue is adorned by street-car tracks, the middle of Seventh Avenue by parking.

These two highways, frontiers of the opposed extremes of dark-skinned social life, are separated by an intermediate

communicate chiefly by way of 135th Street. Accordingly 135th Street is the heart and soul of black Harlem; it is common ground, the natural scene of unusual contacts, a region that disregards class. It neutralizes, equilibrates, binds, rescues union out of diversity.

In a fraction of a mile of 135th Street there occurs every institution necessary to civilization, from a Carnegie library opposite a public school at one point to a police station beside an undertaker's parlor at another. But one institution outnumbers all others an institution which, like the street itself, represents common ground: the barber shop overwhelmingly predominates.

Naturally on the day of the Barbers' Annual Ball this institution clipped off, among other things, several working hours. The barbers had their own necks to trim, their own knots to conquer, their own jowls to shave and massage.