Oberammergau and Justification by Faith

Extract

‘You must be a believer,’ said an Irish Protestant, ‘to go to Oberammergau.’ Perhaps this good paterfamilias, revealed what the shock of the actualities of Catholicism awoke in him—the sense that he was a vague Theist, or perhaps, as theologians might say, some sort of Monophysite, but that he was disinherited from the Incarnation, and was but confounded, when taken inside the household of faith. All round him in Ireland the faithful lived, bad and good; and had the Faith. But he never went into the only places that best be called churches, nor divined the instinct for reality, the knowledge of the true proportion of things, the supernatural insight, belonging even to the most untried faith.

It is, indeed, no light mantle of greatness, worn (thought Dr. Martineau), by even the humblest Catholic, belonging to a religion passing times and lands, in which there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither bond or free, of which kings have been the nursing fathers, and queens the nursing mothers, for which princes have laid down their crowns, and where, daily, wealth hides its pomp under the rough robe of the cloister (that place in which the Christians still have all things in common); the religion that cares not for race, nor language, for feudalism nor revolution; in the sense, that, whatever turns up among

‘the rapid, blind,

And fleeting generations of mankind,’

the Church will be always there, at home under Charles the Great, and in English haphazard colonies, that Church of the French Jesuits,