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I was brought up in a society in which “Catholic” was a term of reproach and contempt. I have lived long enough and moved far enough from my boyhood’s home to find myself among people who regard “Catholic” as a name of high praise. But, except in their opinion of this word, I am not sure that there is any great difference between my friends of forty-five years ago and my friends to-day.

I grew up in Belfast, with holiday excursions to north Antrim. There and then “Catholic” meant Roman Catholic, and Roman Catholicism was the religion of the mere Irish, whom we regarded as an inferior race. We credited these unfortunate Gibeonites with all the slave vices—untruthfulness, dishonesty, laziness, cowardice, a dislike of progress, and an unwillingness to wash their faces. If they had the slave virtues—which are perhaps also Christian virtues—meekness, humility, gentleness, and patience, they were welcome to them. We did not want them for ourselves, any more than we wanted saints, Masses, Gregorian chants or anything else with a suspicion of Catholicism about it.

We did, indeed, Sunday after Sunday profess, though without fervour, a belief in the Holy Catholic Church, which another creed taught us to call One and Apostolic as well as Catholic. I have no idea now what we meant by the words, nor do I remember troubling myself about the matter at the time. To another phrase which was constantly on the lips of our clergy in church, I did attach a clear meaning. We prayed for “the good estate of the Catholic Church,” and that struck me as a kind and charitable thing to do, though rather useless. The Catholic Church, being what I supposed it to be, was certainly past praying for. Still—I remember feeling this with some pride—it was nice of us to go on trying, just as it was kind of Burns to cherish some hope of the ultimate escape of “Auld Nickie Ben” from the hell in which he was confined. It never occurred to me that I was supposed to be praying for my own Church.

Now I find myself among people who rejoice in the word “Catholic,” and I have to readjust what some German theologian calls my value-judgment of the word. The clergy round about me insist that they are Catholics, and the laity whom they have succeeded in instructing—with how much toil!—are almost over-anxious to secure possession of the title. We deny it only to those whose religion we thoroughly despise. If anyone denies it to us, as some of the adherents of the Pope sometimes do, we are irritated, and retort by calling them schismatical members of an Italian Mission.

I sometimes wonder whether this change in the esteem of the word has made any real difference at all.

Of course there is the matter of ritual. That has changed. A church service is a very different thing to-day from what it was when I was a boy. The clergyman I “sat under”—the phrase has disappeared, but we used it then—wore a very long surplice without a cassock while reading the prayers, and a black gown when he preached, retiring during a hymn to change the garments. Now he wears a shorter surplice and a cassock while reading Mattins and changes his clothes, more or less, when he ministers at the altar. Then, he faced the congregation as often as he conveniently could. Now, he is inclined to turn his back on the people. But are these changes, and a hundred others which might be listed out, of any great importance? Are they anything more than the changes which have taken place in the ritual of the dinner-table on festal occasions? I can remember when the host sat at the head of a long table, with a friendly smile reaching almost from side-whisker to side-whisker, and a perspiring servant set, perhaps, an immense turkey before him. He whetted a knife and with the skill of a surgeon cut suitable slices off the bird. Now the carving is done in the kitchen, or at a side-table, somewhere out of sight. Then we drank a great deal of wine and never even hoped to be allowed to smoke. Now we can scarcely refrain from tobacco till we have gulped a single glass of port. Yet it will hardly be maintained that our manners are either worse or better than they were, or that one form of ritual is any more civilized than the other.

We went out from one of those old dinners with a comfortable feeling of satiety. We achieve exactly the same agreeable sensation after a feast eaten in a newer way. We returned home on the Sundays of my boyhood, after our Protestant worship, with a soothing feeling that we had paid our respects to God, perhaps heartened a little for our struggle against the world, the flesh, and the devil in the days before us, comforted in our troubles, relieved of the worst of our fears, convinced afresh that the “The Lord is King.” We return home now after the most Catholic of sung Masses, and the results are very much the same. Both then and now, whatever else we got or missed, we felt it due to our self-respect to say that the choir sang out of tune and time. Young men and women in a gallery disgraced themselves over Jackson’s Te Deum then. Now surpliced boys and men in the chancel come to grief over Merbecke in B flat, or whatever letter, flat or sharp, Merbecke’s adapters have confined him in. The effect on us is exactly the same. We say that we suffer, so as to convince other people that we are musical.

But of course ritual is not the important thing, and no one, not even the youngest curate or the lady church worker, would say that it is. I suspect that they sometimes think it is, but they do not say so out loud in public places.

Much more important than ritual is “the faith,” the Catholic faith, once for all delivered to the saints. But has this altered in any important way? There are differences of emphasis, no doubt. I notice of late years that our fervent Catholics make as much as possible, by gesture sometimes as well as intonation, out of “and was made man” in the Nicene Creed. When I was a boy my spiritual pastors were more inclined to stress “was crucified under Pontius Pilate.” But then, as now, the whole formula was recited. I cannot suppose that emphasis, even accompanied with genuflexions, can make much difference to the faith professed.

One of my very earliest recollections is of an elderly clergyman, white-haired, venerable, and benignant. One day in my father’s study he took me, then a toddling child, and set me on his knee. He taught me, though I could scarcely pronounce the words, to say, “No Pope. No priest. No surrender. Hurrah!” I knew nothing of that old gentleman then except that he was kind. I learned after his death that he was a devoted man who gave his whole powers and all his energies to a huge parish, full of working men, very much as the best of our Catholic priests do now in our great cities. His church, a bare and hideous hall, was crammed Sunday after Sunday by enthusiastic congregations, to whom he preached—“the faith,” I think. At all events he held the faith, even “the Catholic faith whole and undefiled,” for he had a passionate affection for the Athanasian Creed. And surely there is nothing more Catholic and more full of faith than that? The Irish Church had not yet released its priests and people from the duty of saying that creed on certain days, but I feel sure that my old friend would have gone on saying that creed, fiercely, even if he had been forbidden, all the more fiercely, perhaps, because he was forbidden.

He called himself a Protestant with explosive pride. He would be called a Protestant, with contempt, by most of us to-day. Yet even in the matter of devotion to the Church he was scarcely excelled by any Anglo-Catholic. There was a distinction then—it is still sometimes made in Ireland—between Protestants and Dissenters. “Is he a Protestant or a Presbyterian?” we asked; or said “He’s a Methodist, not a Protestant.” Protestant meant churchman, strictly that and nothing else. If the Anglican Church is what she claims to be with ever-growing insistence, then Protestant for us meant Catholic, which seems odd. For political purposes, when inveighing against the policy of Home Rule, we did sometimes talk of our “Fellow Protestants, the Presbyterians and Methodists.” But we did not really mean that there was any religious fellowship. An Anglo-Catholic to-day might, conceivably, call a Baptist a fellow-Christian, if some political party contemplated an attack upon the institution of marriage; but he would mean no more by it than a temporary association for the purpose of terrifying the offending statesman. Our old distinction between Protestant and Nonconformist was as clear as anything could possibly be.

Certainly the faith of my friend, his conviction of the truth and importance of Nicene belief was as complete as the Church demanded. And that old gentleman was typical of a whole school of clergy, exactly like many whom I knew well in later years when I was a young man.

Even the detestation of “Popery,” which they called Catholicism, was not so intense as to prevent their approving of such good as came from Rome. One of them, a belated survival of an almost extinct class, once expressed to me the warmest admiration for a Papal Bull, declaring in most un-Protestant language that its author was the bulwark of Christendom. The Bull was that—De Pascendi Gregis, I think—which condemned the poor Modernists. Would even our most advanced Catholics to-day say anything nicer about the Pope than that?

It seems to me, therefore, that “the faith” has not substantially changed, and that so far as it is concerned the Protestant of my youth and the Catholic of to-day are very much alike.

There remains the question of Devotions, not the manner of them, which is ritual, not the belief at the back of them, which is faith, but the spirit which they foster, in which they are undertaken. The Protestants of my youth were fond of prayer meetings which they held in schoolrooms and such places rather than in church. In church they felt bound to adhere strictly to the form and words of the Prayer Book, holding that inside consecrated walls it was disloyal to alter or amplify the Church’s order. Since the authorized services of the Prayer Book failed to meet their spiritual needs—just as they fail to meet those of Catholics to-day—they practised supplementary devotions in unconsecrated rooms, where they could indulge in orgies of extempore prayer without the disagreeable feeling that they were being disloyal to the Church. There were at those meetings “addresses” which we were careful not to call sermons and much singing of what a schoolboy friend of mine condemns as “slushy” hymns. What was aimed at, and often achieved, was unction, a warm kind of religious emotion which certainly had its value in lifting the soul heavenwards. The danger was unctuousness, tepid religiosity, as unpleasant as the ungloved clasp of a perspiring hand.

I am no judge of these practices, for I do not like having my emotions stirred, being, I suppose, temperamentally a formalist. I have therefore no right to express an opinion. But I cannot help feeling that our new Catholic devotions are in spirit and effect very like those Protestant prayer meetings. The main difference, not a very great one, is that the new devotions are practised in church. In the old Protestant days those who did not like them could escape if they chose by confining their acts of public worship to consecrated buildings. Now we are not safe anywhere and may find ourselves knee-deep in emotion when we expect and want nothing worse than a sober petition for “All sorts and conditions of men.” The Anglo-Catholic takes a rather looser view than the Protestant did of the obligation to use the forms set forth in the Book of Common Prayer and none other. I dare say he is right. The old Protestants were too strict when they retired to schoolrooms before breaking out into unauthorized devotions.

I am sure that both are right in seeking new food for hungry souls; even quails, when the perpetual diet of manna proves tiresome and unsatisfying. Fervent men have always wanted more than sober authority provides. The later Saint Anthony had, I feel sure, no commission to go preaching to the fishes, nor had his earlier namesake any licence for his aggressive singing of the sixty-eighth Psalm when the devil invaded his desert hermitage. Religion is, and always will be, new wine. It is the fate of old bottles to be burst when the fermentation begins.

All I want to hint is that no real change has followed our discarding the name Protestant and adopting Catholic instead. The fine old Evangelicals of my youth had no business to be angry, though they were, with those whom they called Puseyites, Tractarians, and Ritualists. The Anglo-Catholic ought not to be so contemptuous as he is of those whom he calls Protestants. No one knows, and unless some angel keeps statistics no one ever will know, whether the souls of simple men get to heaven in greater numbers with one label tied to them rather than the other. And getting to heaven must, I suppose, be the end and object of all we do in the way of religion.

Perhaps the difference between Catholic and Protestant is really one of temper. If so, it is something real and important. In Catholicism there seems to be a certain suavity, the result of a feeling of security. Protestantism is another name for aggression in religion. The Catholic spirit belongs to the man who is comfortably aware of being one of an unassailable majority. The Protestant is forced to assert himself and his position. His spirit is the vice—or perhaps the virtue—of active minorities. The Catholic is conscious of being a member of that universal, time-transcending Church which is the blessed company of all faithful people. He does not want to say so and is quietly tolerant of people who do not understand. The Protestant is eager to proclaim an evangel of some kind, and therefore must be aggressive. A man may possibly belong to some quite small body of Christians and still have the spirit of a Catholic, though no doubt this is rare and difficult. Most of the members of the Irvingite body, queer as their religion is, seem to me to be Catholic in spirit. They have that feeling of security which saves them from the necessity of self-assertion.

The possession of this spirit has nothing, or very little, to do with belief. A man might accept and exult in every decree ever issued by the Vatican and yet miss the Catholic spirit. If he goes about the world shouting, “I’m a Catholic! I’m a Catholic!” with the inevitable implication “And you’re not,” he plainly does miss it. His very shouting proves that he is not the thing he wants us to think he is. To be “superior” is the vice of sects in religion, just as it is of cliques in literature and art. The superior person in letters, art, and culture is never great. The best he can be is precious. The superior person in religion, just because he is contemptuous, fails to achieve the position of a Catholic.

This is not to say that the Catholic-minded man is a more useful or even a better man than the man with the Protestant spirit. He is pleasanter to live with. That is all. Just as a gentleman is pleasanter to live with than an egotist. Perhaps all successful missionaries, all leaders of armies of invasion in thought and morals, are necessarily Protestant in spirit. They could hardly be successful if they did not want to argue and to fight—that is to say, if they were not aggressive. Perhaps Catholic-minded people are always somewhat ineffective, since the sense of security brings with it a disinclination for the exertion of controversy.

If this is so—if, as is quite unlikely, I am right in supposing that the essential notes of Catholicity are security and calm, while the characteristic of Protestantism is energetic aggression—then we reach the paradoxical conclusion that the most earnest Catholics are really Protestants though they do not know it, and that many who are passively proud of their Protestantism are Catholic at heart. This cannot possibly be true, so I must have gone wrong somewhere in my reasoning. I am scarcely surprised. Nor am I repentant. It is not in the least unpleasant to be mistaken, and I have always enjoyed playing about with words, especially with words which are provocative of passion when treated solemnly.