ABSTRACT
there is a widespread recurrence of the longing for eternal truth, for a truth not to be discussed or corrected or modified, a constant rule of life for humanity, a sure guide to the haven where it would be. And since the Church of Rome offers such a rule and such guidance more generously than any other existing institution, it is on the need for an eternal truth that it most effectively bases the appeal to take shelter under its wings. In the eighteenth century too it was by this argument, which he called ‘triumphant’, that Gibbon was made a convert, however temporarily, to Catholicism. ‘There must be’, he writes in his autobiography, ‘an infallible judge somewhere; and the Church of Rome is the only Christian society which pretends or can pretend to that title’. Eternal truth, a universal creed, a perfectly ordered society, perpetual peace, are all mutually interdependent and indeed inseparable. And since all such ideas in the end deny the whole conception of life as essentially and unalterably change and movement, it is not hard to see that they are self-contradictory and void of logical significance. Lacking this significance, in whatever logical forms they may clothe themselves, they can only be symptoms of passion—cries of distress, sighs of lamentation, ravings. Even the aforesaid ‘triumphant argument’ is not logical but ‘emotive’, or, more properly, oratorical; of power to move men’s minds in favour of an institution, the Church of Rome or some rival with a numerous and faithful following, such as has appeared more than once in our time and whose fate has yet to be decided.
