Discussions

After encountering two different kinds of philosophers, Turnbull and MacIan start their own discussion in chapter VII and VIII of 'The ball and the cross'. They start about nature and its existence; then they try to lay their problem before an ordinary man. This man does not solve their differences, so they argue further. MacIan attacks Turnbull as follows:

You hold that your heretics and sceptics have helped the world forward and handed on a lamp of progress. I deny it. Nothing is plainer from real history than that each of your heretics invented a complete cosmos of his own which the next heretic smashed entirely to pieces. [-] [Freethought] can never be progressive because it will accept nothing from the past; it begins every time again from the beginning; and it goes every time in a different direction. 

MacIan continues that there are only two things that can progress: strictly physical science and the Catholic Church. For the church, he specifically mentioned progress in the moral world. Turnbull, of course, does not see such progress. MacIan explains:

Catholic virtue is often invisible because it is the normal. Christianity is always out of fashion because it is always sane; and all fashions are mild insanities. When Italy is mad on art the Church seems to Puritanical; when England is mad on Puritanism the Church seems to artistic.[-] The Church always seems to be behind the times, when it is really beyond the times;