Where All Roads Lead

By this time it must be obvious that every single thing in the Catholic Church which was condemned by the modern world has now been re-introduced by the modern world, and always in a lower form. The Puritans rejected art and symbolism, and the Decadents brought them back again, with all the old appeal to sense and an additional appeal to sensuality. The rationalists rejected supernatural healing, and it was brought back by Yankee charlatans who not only proclaimed supernatural healing, but forbade natural healing. Protestant moralists abolished the confessional and the Psycho-Analysts have re-established the confessional, with every one of its alleged dangers and not one of its admitted safeguards. The Protestant patriots resented the intervention of an international faith, and went on to evolve an empire entangled in international finance. Having complained that the family was insulted by monasticism, they have lived to see the family broken in pieces by bureaucracy; having objected to fasts being appointed for anybody during any exceptional interval, they have survived to see teetotalers and vegetarians trying to impose a fast on everybody for ever.All this, as I say, has become obvious, but there is a further development of the truth with which I am more especially dealing here; which concerns not so much the case of these general movements which may almost be called vulgar errors, but rather the case of certain individual ideas that are the private inspiration of individuals. As I said in the last issue, a young man may, without any very offensive vanity, come to the conclusion that he has something to say

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