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religion becomes identical with culture, either the culture of the
masses or the culture of the elite.
I have intentionally kept the argument limited to the con–
ception of the Church as an institution, as this was the question
raised. In fact, of course, it is no more simply an institution than the
United States is its organized government. It is, and thinks of itself
as being, the community of all the souls of the faithful living and
dead, past and to come.
VI.
Orthodoxy an,d Heresy.
In any future that we can envisage, we seem likely to live
increasingly in a world of one culture and many faiths, (assuming,
that
is,
that Communism does not succeed in conquering the world).
In such a world the heretic is not the man who chooses his own
truth, but the man who insists on his own taste, who, say, dislikes ice–
cream or Italian opera in English. The likelihood of this condition
does not, for me at any rate, make it desirable. A faith, on the other
hand, which really is a faith and believes, therefore, that it is in pos–
session of the truth, is by necessity missionary and must intend to con–
vert the world.
The Church has, I think, learned one lesson the hard way, that
persecution makes no converts. She is only beginning to learn that, as
Newman also said, "it is as foolish to try and argue a man into be–
lief as it is to try and torture him into it." Perhaps one should
amend this slightly and say that fruitful argument is only possible
between friends and that two people cannot become friends unless
they can share each other's culture: my friend is one who under–
stands my jokes. Thus, wherever the Church desires to preach the
gospel, whether to savages, the industrial working class or intel–
lectuals, she must in everything that does not concern faith and
morals "go native."
In theory she has always held that every other religion was a
revelation, partial or distorted but real, of the true God, that she
must always say, like St. Paul on the Acropolis, "He whom ye ig–
norantly worship, Him I declare unto you." In practice she has all
too often denied this out of cultural pride so that the unbeliever
has heard, not the good news itself, but the superior accents of the
European and the white gentleman in which it was uttered.
