Hilaire Belloc
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Section 2 of Catholic and Anti-Catholic History by Various.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain.
Anti-Catholic History by G.K.
Chesterton.
The following theses were proposed for discussion by Mr. Chesterton at the recent Catholic Congress at Birmingham, England.
Each thesis is followed by an illustrative example.
1.
anti catholic history is false not only in the light of our faith but in the light of the historical science to which that history has appealed for example we do not profess to prove that the gospels are inspired but the attempt to prove that they were late forgeries or fictions has been abandoned
two anti catholic history is most false and dangerous when it is not avowedly anti catholic for example protestant pamphlets are less and less read but newspapers and popular works of reference probably more read
and they perpetuate the bad history of fifty years ago three anti catholic history fails because history is a story and here it can never give the beginning of a story for example it has to begin with the spanish inquisition in existence and excess
it cannot tell how it came to be there without telling a heroic story of european struggle against islam or oriental pessimism nearly all our traditions good or bad were born catholic and the truth about their birth is concealed
four anti catholic history is generally superficial it depends on certain particular catchwords cases and names while catholic history can handle the whole texture of the truth for example anybody who has heard the word galileo can say galileo even if he pronounces it wrong
but nobody who has read any ordinary indifferent mass of detail about the middle ages or the renaissance can continue to believe that the church discouraged science five anti catholic history is also helped largely by legend which may be natural and even healthy but it is not scientific
for example it is legend to talk of the elizabethan age as the unique triumph of emancipated england on the strength of a real romance of seafaring even more characteristic of catholic spain and of one supreme poet who was almost certainly a catholic
six anti catholic history constantly confesses an old error in launching a new one for example fifty years ago a man like mr george moore would deny that there was any evidence for a historical jesus and call him a corn myth or a sun god
The moment a skeptic thinks of another way of evading the resurrection, a way that allows him to treat Jesus as a historical character, he instantly treats him as a historical character.
seven anti catholic history is narrow and unimaginative because it always conceives all men as looking forward to what did happen instead of to the hundred things which might have happened or which most of them wished to happen for example anybody who might have differed from any pope about anything
st francis for instance is made a morning star of the reformation though in fact the fraticelli who went further than st francis were obviously going further and further away from the reformation eight anti catholic history abounds in very casual remarks so false that they can only be contradicted by long and complicated statements
for example chambers's encyclopaedia speaks of the rosary that somewhat mechanical devotion which was employed by dominic among the albigenses a catholic might write pages about that but he would at least have to say
the rosary like the lord's prayer is as mechanical as you make it b used with intensity it is freer than the lord's prayer consisting of individual meditation on infinite mysteries c nobody would be such a fool as to use a merely mechanical thing to convert the albigenses
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