If the world wanted what is called a non-controversial aspect of
Christianity, it would probably select Christmas. Yet it is obviously bound up
with what is supposed to be a controversial aspect (I could never at any stage
of my opinions imagine why); the respect paid to the Blessed Virgin. When I was
a boy a more Puritan generation objected to a statue upon my parish church
representing the Virgin and Child. After much controversy, they compromised by
taking away the Child. One would think that this was even more corrupted with
Mariolatry, unless the mother was counted less dangerous when deprived of a
sort of weapon. But the practical difficulty is also a parable. You cannot chip
away the statue of a mother from all round that of a newborn child. You cannot
suspend the new-born child in mid-air; indeed you cannot really have a statue
of a newborn child at all. Similarly, you cannot suspend the idea of a newborn
child in the void or think of him without thinking of his mother. You cannot
visit the child without visiting the mother, you cannot in common human life
approach the child except through the mother. If we are to think of Christ in
this aspect at all, the other idea follows it as it is followed in history. We
must either leave Christ out of Christmas, or Christmas out of Christ, or we
must admit, if only as we admit it in an old picture, that those holy heads are
too near together for the haloes not to mingle and cross.
The Everlasting Man
Even where we can hardly call the Christian greater, we are forced to
call him larger. But it is so to whatever philosophy or heresy or modern
movement we may turn. How would Francis the Troubadour have fared among the
Calvinists, or for that matter among the Utilitarians of the Manchester School?
Yet men like Bossuet and Pascal could be as stern and logical as any Calvinist
or Utilitarian. How would St. Joan of Arc, a woman waving on men to war with
the sword, have fared among the Quakers or the Doukhabors or the Tolstoyan sect
of pacifists? Yet any number of Catholic saints have spent their lives in
preaching peace and preventing wars. It is the same with all the modern
attempts at Syncretism. They are never able to make something larger than the
Creed without leaving something out. I do not mean leaving out something divine
but something human; the flag or the inn or the boy's tale of battle or the
hedge at the end of the field. The Theosophists build a pantheon; but it is
only a pantheon for pantheists. They call a Parliament of Religions as a
reunion of all the peoples; but it is only a reunion of all the prigs. Yet
exactly such a pantheon had been set up two thousand years before by the shores
of the Mediterranean; and Christians were invited to set up the image of Jesus
side by side with the image of Jupiter, of Mithras, of Osiris, of Atys, or of
Ammon. It was the refusal of the Christians that was the
turning-point of history. If the Christians had accepted, they and the whole world would have
certainly, in a grotesque but exact metaphor, gone to pot. They would all have
been boiled down to one lukewarm liquid in that great pot of cosmopolitan
corruption in which all the other myths and mysteries were already melting. It
was an awful and an appalling escape. Nobody understands the nature of the
Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does
not realize that the whole world once very nearly died of broad-mindedness and.
the brotherhood of all religions.
The Everlasting Man
