And yet Catholicism does not abandon ethics.  No!  No modern religion can leave ethics on one side.  But our religion—­although its doctors may protest against this—­is fundamentally and for the most part a compromise between eschatology and ethics; it is eschatology pressed into the service of ethics.  What else but this is that atrocity of the eternal pains of hell, which agrees so ill with the Pauline apocatastasis?  Let us bear in mind those words which the Theologica Germanica, the manual of mysticism that Luther read, puts into the mouth of God:  “If I must recompense your evil, I must recompense it with good, for I am and have none other.”  And Christ said:  “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” and there is no man who perhaps knows what he does.  But it has been necessary, for the benefit of the social order, to convert religion into a kind of police system, and hence hell.  Oriental or Greek Christianity is predominantly eschatological, Protestantism predominantly ethical, and Catholicism is a compromise between the two, although with the eschatological element preponderating.  The most authentic Catholic ethic, monastic asceticism, is an ethic of eschatology, directed to the salvation of the individual soul rather than to the maintenance of society.  And in the cult of virginity may there not perhaps be a certain obscure idea that to perpetuate ourselves in others hinders our own personal perpetuation?  The ascetic morality is a negative morality.  And, strictly, what is important for a man is not to die, whether he sins or not.  It is not necessary to take very literally, but as a lyrical, or rather rhetorical, effusion, the words of our famous sonnet—­

    No me mueve, mi Dios, para quererte
    el cielo que me tienes prometido,[20]

and the rest that follows.

The real sin—­perhaps it is the sin against the Holy Ghost for which there is no remission—­is the sin of heresy, the sin of thinking for oneself.  The saying has been heard before now, here in Spain, that to be a liberal—­that is, a heretic—­is worse than being an assassin, a thief, or an adulterer.  The gravest sin is not to obey the Church, whose infallibility protects us from reason.

And why be scandalized by the infallibility of a man, of the Pope?  What difference does it make whether it be a book that is infallible—­the Bible, or a society of men—­the Church, or a single man?  Does it make any essential change in the rational difficulty?  And since the infallibility of a book or of a society of men is not more rational than that of a single man, this supreme offence in the eyes of reason had to be posited.