SLAV REVOLUTIONARY CATHOLICISM

A FAR AIM AND A NARROW WAY.


If Providence bestows on the English Church only once in every half century
a man like Bishop Westcott, this Church, I think, can be sure of a solid
and sound longevity. Well, this Bishop Westcott spoke once enthusiastically
of "_the noble catholicity which is the glory of the English Church_." My
intention in this lecture is to describe to you an island in the Roman
Catholic Church among the Slavs, which island is distinguished by a _noble
catholicity_. "I believe in the holy _catholic_ apostolic church." This
sentence that you repeat in London, as do the Roman Catholics in Rome, and
we Orthodox in Moscow, has always two meanings, a sectarian and a
universal, or a narrow one and a sublime one. The first meaning belongs to
the people who imagine Christ standing at the boundary of their Church,
turned with his face to them and with his back to all other "schismatic"
peoples. The second belongs to the people who think that Christ may be also
beyond their own churchyard; that the dwelling of their soul may be too
narrow for His soul, and that their self-praisings and schismatic
thunderings are very relative in His eyes. I propose to speak to-night
about the people of this second category, _i.e._, of the people who are in
the Christian history like a link connecting the different parts, the
different Churches, into a higher unity. I will limit my considerations in
this lecture to Slav Roman Catholicism. I call my theme of to-night "Slav
Revolutionary Catholicism." Why "revolutionary"?

Why not? Is not Christianity a revolutionary movement from its very
beginning? Is it not the most wonderful and the most noble among the
revolutionary movements in history? Cardinal Newman and many others spoke