The Rejection and Protection of Faith

THE REJECTION AND PROTECTION OF FAITH SOMETIMES, a man who withdraws his allegiance to the Catholic Church on the plea of " lost faith " is viewed with sympathy by his former co-religionists, much as a mechanic whose hand has been cut off is commiserated by his fellows. More than frequent, this occurrence is common; it is the outgrowth of an attitude which is widespread. The boy who goes to a state university well grounded in the principles of his religion, and returns unprincipled because that ground has been replaced with the shifting sands of chronic doubt, is generally pitied, rather than blamed. How often it is said, " Poor chap! He has no faith; his studies took it away from him." One pities the habitually vicious youth who " loses his liberty " because he has killed a man in cold blood. Yet such regret recognizes that the murderer is responsible for his own plight; the loss he suffers is self inflicted. The point of view toward " loss of faith " bears a different stamp; the loser is thought of as more sinned against than sinning. Something has been taken from him-as if faith were carried around in the head as a purse is carried in the pocket, an easy prey to the wily mind of an intellectual light-fingers. This consideration of defection from the faith as a sort of unavoidable, albeit tragic, plight into which a man is pushed, or as a sort of loss inflicted on a man from the outside misses, almost completely, the true role that man himself plays in faith. If we speak precisely, we cannot say that a man loses his faith. Actually, a man cannot lose his faith; it is an impossibility. Many things man has he can lose, things which belong to him more properly than faith does. Arms, legs, life itself, may be lost. A man can even lose his mind; circumstances of which he has no mastery whatsoever can enter in and unseat his reason, but while that reason rules no book, no school, no teacher, no education has power to make a man lose his faith. These are circumstances in which a man places himself, and which, all 3 88 34 PHILIP F. MULHERN too easily, may occasion the rejection of faith; they cannot take it from him. A man may be deprived of his faith, but the deprivation is self-imposed; a man does not lose his faith; he throws it away. When a fine roadster has been hustled away from a man's door at midnight to have its engine number changed by a gang of auto thieves, the owner has been imposed upon. He has suffered the loss of his car. There is no parity between this and loss of faith. Even though a Catholic leaves his faith in a road where it might be said to tempt every faith-stealer in the world, it just cannot be sneaked off while its owner is busy with other matters. Pry and push as the world will, only the possessor of faith has the key which can release it. " Loss " of faith is not a mere privation imposed on a man; it is not only a withdrawal of assent to doctrines which were once firmly adhered to, for giving up the faith involves a positive act of the will moving the intellect to deny doctrines it once affirmed. This downright pertinacity of the will present in every departure from the faith is commonly overlooked. Very often it is thought that God, somehow, is responsible for a man's defection, as if He suddenly put out the light of faith in a man's mind, for some reason of His own and without any action on the man's part. This sort of explanation is far from rare. Who has not heard the would-be pious remark, " Well, the Lord, for some reason He understands took his faith away from him." If such an explanation is far from rare, it as far from being correct. Because in all things God is eternal, His love for man too, is eternal, immutable. Faith, by which man comes to dwell in God, is an...