Skip to the text
Ember
PT

Section IV. The Material World

Modern science has divided and mapped out for us the whole of nature into various kingdoms and provinces, each representing a separate science, some formed on peculiar axioms of their own, and some on a principle of classification. These kingdoms are very unequally illuminated in the present state of discovery. Some appear to be well-nigh finished and complete sciences; others again almost like regions unexplored, with objects seen indistinctly, and as it were, in a bright haze. Yet all of these sciences are full of sacred philosophy, full of God. They raise the mind to Him, and often illustrate with peculiar force the teaching of strict and scientific theology. Kightly viewed, these various kingdoms of science represent to us the intellect of humanity, acknowledging at once the dignity and the difficulty of the search after God, and so dividing among its children separate tasks, distinct provinces, in which to limit their investigations and their discoveries; so that the one united toil of all human minds should be a magnificent and universal search for God. The physics of ancient times seemed to follow a loftier method than those of recent days.1 The ancients took the nature of things in themselves to argue from, and began, like Aristotle, by laying down principles which should be fundamental truths in the very nature of things. But this was too high a flight; and consequently, in comparison with the light of modern times, ancient physics may be regarded as a failure. The later method of minute experiment, of registered observa tions, and of patient induction, is more fit for man, and more appropriate to a search after God amid the conceal ments of the natural world \ and hence has come its eminent success. No sight can be more grateful to a true theologian than to behold the giant strides of scientific discovery, and the bold methods of scientific research. He has nothing to fear for his faith; except an embarrassment arising from the very riches of its demonstration, which these discoveries are continually supplying. Nothing can be more narrow, vulgar, or stupid, than the idea of an antithesis between science and religion. It is true that some of the sciences, in the earlier periods of their construction, turned the heads of those who drank at their fountains; and crude theories, irico'mpatible with the dogmas of the faith, were the result. Yet these only changed at last to fresh and more striking proofs of the divine and unalterable truth of our holy faith. For further discovery, and a larger induction, led in every case to an abandonment of the irreligious theory. Mean while nothing shows the divinity of science more clearly than this, that it is so full of God and under such a necessity of reflecting His attributes and operations in all sorts of ways, that even theories constructed to hasten discovery, and which acted for a while as conditions of discovery, until discovery itself proved them at last to be untenable, still gave true illustrations of the power, the wisdom, and the beauty of God, and bore consistent and harmonious testimony as well to His goodness as to His existence. Thus if we range through the sciences one after another we shall find each of them disclosing to us different vestiges of God, while the analogies of the different sciences together reflect, as in a mirror, that prime magnificence of God, His ever-blessed Unity.

Geology, which is the history of nature, has been re garded as a science, the cultivation of which is especially dangerous to religious habits of mind. If it be so, it is the mind that is in fault and not the science. The whole series of controversies ending in the admission of the extreme modernness of the present surface of the globe and the novelty of man in creation, is nothing else but a 28 V long chain of proofs of the Mosaic narrative.2 If we follow the geologist, as he burrows through the successive beds which form the crust of the earth, and sees in different beds a new creation of organic life, partly copied from the one anterior, partly anticipating the one to follow, until at last the fossil remains tell of organic life but little removed from inorganic matter, and then we enter regions where clearly there never was organic life at all, but only brute matter; if we follow him thus from the alluvial deposits to the hard granite, what fields of religious thought are opened out to us! Kingdoms of animals when man their king was not yet created, millions and millions of years while earth was preparing for the human race, silent grim epochs of inorganic matter out of which God was gaining glory in unimaginable ways, awful and hideous catastrophes, a sort of calendar to measure some portion of the life of God before there was any life of man! Geology, while it overwhelms us with its gigantic periods of time, seems at the same time to send out a dim exploring light into the eternity that was before creation: and while it exhibits to us our own planet undergoing appalling vicissitudes for ages without a rational inhabitant upon it, it shows us that science cannot object, at least in the present state of knowledge, to our choosing to regard the other planets and the stars as still untenanted, if in our view it better suits our doc trines of the Incarnation and of the Headship of Christ, and, if we think so, the general structure of revelation. Not that theology needs to shrink from the blaze of any possible discoveries; only that theologians, like others, may use their liberty while they have it. Theology itself will be found to fit all discoveries as they come. It is only the individual theologians who may sometimes have to humour their own private ideas.3

What geology is to time astronomy is to space. Some how it widens our idea of God, just as the sky at mid night sensibly swells and expands the mind of him who gazes on it. We may examine the movements and laws of the earth, aa

She from west her silent course advances With inoffensive pace, that spinning sleeps On her soft axle, while she paces even, And bears theo soft with the smooth air along.

Or we may study the theory of the moon, her inequalities and eccentricities. We may observe each separate planet, or take a view of the solar system altogether. We may rise to the fixed stars, the double stars, the clusters of stars, and the enormous tracts of spiral nebulous matter, forming if so be into new worlds, or come nearer home to the zodiacal light, regarded, if the disciples of Laplace require it, as a new planet in the act of being thrown off from the sun. And everywhere we have God, every where we have instances and explications of those necessary truths which He, not experience, has planted in our minds; and nowhere a vestige of any law in the least in consistent with the manifold definitions, scriptural de ductions, or ecclesiastical dogmas of theology. There is nothing in Astronomy at present to hinder our forming a theory, which shall fall in most harmoniously with the ideas we gather for ourselves out of the Incarnation. Yet these ideas are not the doctrine of the Incarnation. They are not infallible truths; and the theory is but a theory, which can be abandoned without pain, and with out a vestige of consequence to our theology, if ever the rigorous proofs of fresh discovery should dismantle it.

There is nothing to hinder us from believing, if we choose to believe it, that earth alone of all the planetary, golar, lunar, or sidereal bodies is inhabited by reasonable creatures — that the creation of material reasonable beings began with the planet of earth — that it is the garden of the solar system, which is itself the beautiful garden of all other or vaster systems — that it is just on the confines of solid and fluid so commingled as to subserve organic and specially human life — that it is specially beautiful because specially habitable — and that in God's works habitability is the eminence of beauty — that the other planetary and sidereal bodies are still in the azoic, or protozoic, or palaeozoic, or neozoic stage — that analogy gives us no reasons for preferring a system of cosmogonical chronology which would require that the planets shomld be contemporaneously in the same stage — that the force of any such or similar analogies is not greater than the theological inconveniences to the doctrine of the Incarnation, the unity of God's family of intellectual creatures, the headship of Christ, or the silence of the Scriptures — that if the actual position of our planet gives it no physical prerogatives, the fact that our Lord was in carnate in it and of the lineage of Adam gives it special prerogatives, higher than physical ones, even if the benefits of the Incarnation be extended to races of planetary beings, neither angelical nor human — that the intellectual races of incorporeal angels are our only brothers — that, if so be, when the doom is come, the accounts of the human family made up and balanced, and its destinies wound up and concluded, this indestructible planet may be the theatre of other scenes, with its crust shrivelled off by the burning heat of which St. Peter speaks, and its new surface glorified; and certain obscure revelations to the saints do somewhat indicate the nature of its future — that God may then, if so be, move on to other planets or stars, and successively or synchronistically people them with families of intelligent creatures — that the benefits of the Incarnation will be in some way extended to them, whether they be fallen or keep their integrity, and that with the angels and ourselves they also will form but one family of God, under one human Head, Jesus Christ God and Man. This is a mere gratuitous theory, not pretending either to scientific or theological proof, but simply such an one as our the ological instincts may incline us to form; and all I am saying is that there is nothing, I believe, in the present state of astronomical discovery which shall make it peremptory on us to repudiate it, just as the proof that 28* tt was contrary to gravitation would make it peremptory on us to reject it, at least until the science of the twentieth or thirtieth century might have shown that gravitation was itself only one case of a much wider law, which might be polarity or anything else.4

So in mechanics the respective laws of force, motion, rest, and inertia are only so many revelations of Himself by God j and in these matters experience teaches us, much as it teaches, less than what is innate and fundamental in our minds; though the want of habits of close thought often prevent our evolving it. The same may be said of the laws of sound, light, and heat, which form the sciences of acoustics, optics, and the science which has to do with heat, latent or specific, and its conduction and radiation. If the undulatory theories of all the three, sound, light, and heat, be true, so that they are none of them things, but notions, the operations become still more beautiful, and remind us of the old angelic theory of the Schoolmen Speaking from no more knowledge than the popular manuals on the various subjects contain, it would seem when we come to the study of chemical affinities, the doctrine of imponderable fluids, the theory of atoms and the objections to it, or modifications of it, especially the theory of Boscovitch, which makes matter consist not of solid particles but of mathematical centres of force, — it would seem as if we were getting down into the primeval caves and laboratories of creation, and might expect any moment to come upon God at work, so near to first things, to the limits of the void, do these con siderations appear to bring us. I confess to have almost trembled, half with eagerness and half with fear, in reading of these things, and wondering what the hand of man would touch, and feel, and get hold of next. The presence of God grows then like the thrill that comes from the nearness of one we love. To a religious mind physical science is an intensely religious thing.

Even the likenesses and differences of botany teach us God, the planter of the first garden, as the Bible calls Him. Simple classifications, such as those of mineralogy, are full of Him. The beauties of form in crystals and in plants, which has now made a science of its own, and which every one has at least been superficially struck with in the loveliness of the foliage of trees, is a reflection of the infinite beauty of God. Is it not like a flash of light to us, when we read of crystals, that the same chemical compound always assumes the same geometrical form, and again, that the geometrical symmetry of a crystal corre spends both in degree and kind to the symmetry of its optical properties? Number and music are depths I dare not explore, but surely what the most popular writers say of them shows how they represent the mysterious harmony of God. Numbers are of themselves so fascinating, that there has hardly been an age in which they have not run away with men, and drawn them up into the impenetrable cloud-land of mysticism; and music, I suppose, ig a kind of arithmetic, which seems to lay almost a fearful hold on those to whom it speaks intelligibly and tells its se crets. To the unmusical a musical man is a study, a phenomenon, another sort of creature, and a superior creature. Physiology is an unfixed science, but its uncertainties, such as function and organization, perception and sensation, and at last thought and will, which belong at once to anatomy and to metaphysics, all exhibit God in the tenderness of numberless adaptations and the unattainable perfection of mechanical skill. This science is the home of the doctrine of final causes, which, as every one knows, is a theology of itself. Yet, though our theological bias may lead some of us this way, nevertheless, if proof were given, a theologian could easily take up and assimilate St. Hilaire's seemingly indevout Theory of Analogues, which holds that the struc tures and functions of animals must be judged of by analogy, not by fitness or adaptation, that we are not to ascribe to God any intention, and that final causes are no guides in natural philosophy. Of course we should interpret that remark of not ascribing to God any intention, as meaning no intention that we are able to indicate, not as if there was no intention in the Divine Mind. There is no reason why a theologian passionately fond of theology should not hold, as some have held, that final causes spoil philosophy and are the marplot of the physical sciences. As a matter of fact his instincts may inclime him the other way; but there is nothing in his theolgy to compel him. What seem the shortest roads to the manifestation of God are not always the most theological: and the doctrine of final causes has no special or exclusive right to that honourable epithet.5

Johnson said of Goldsmith's History of Animated Nature, that he could make it as charming as a fairy tale; so in our way of estimating things, we should say of Cuvier's Animal Kingdom, that it was as fascinating as a section of St. Thomas, and equally full of attractions to God and disclosures of Him. Comparative anatomy, as applied to fossils, the changes of the earth's floor from outer fire or from central heat, from the furrowing pressure of water, the destructive and reproductive action of rivers, the gigantic sledges of glaciers, and changes of climate dependent on astronomical laws, the creation, transmutation, and extinction of species, — all these are more or less provinces of geology, which give rise to many interesting and improving theological speculations; while in the hot controversy between the opposing geological doctrines of Catastrophe and Uniformity, both are equally interesting and equally acceptable to theology, though our bias may possibly lean rather to the former theory than to the latter, even while the balance of proof may incline towards the doctrine of Uniformity. Again, when we come to such sciences as ethnology and glossology, we seem to see God acting as the trainer and novice-master of His own Human family.6 But nowhere is God more manifest, nothing in science perhaps is more religious, than the comparison of the two doctrines of gravitation and polarity. In gravitation we see nature, at once keeping herself in motion and at the same time tending to repose. It is as if the huge ribs and beams and frame work of Omnipotence were being laid bare before us. It is as though we saw it new, tremulous, and vibrating with the last touch of the Creative Hand hardly yet lifted off from it. While polarity, that mysterious secret, teaching that like repels like, and unlike attracts unlike, represents to us "opposite elements rushing together, opposite motions reducing each other to rest," God's, huge creation labouring in every particle, like a vessel at' sea, finding concord in discord, reaching unity by opposition, and so, mighty complex onward universe! entering into her rest.

But in the midst of all these sciences we behold a threefold manifestation for God. Inorganic matter and animal life are full of beautiful fitnesses, giving out mute laws which science expresses, as if they were strophes of a hymn to God. Another while we see &nd gaze in revereut silence, on the countless adaptations, which science is daily laying bare in all her kingdoms, to man and his regal state and dominion, as lord of the creation and the younger brother of the Incarnate Word. Then, further on, we see inexplicable things, which seem as though God's own private glory were their only end, the marvels of unsealed mountain-tops, the never to be unveiled crys tals of the lower earth, the forms and lives and colours of the profound sea-caves, and other things which are in the physical world what the sufferings of children and the fires that purge forgiven sin are in the moral world, fountains of Divine Glory, at which we can only kneel and worship. But in the midst of the camp where all those sciences have pitched their tents, there is one Ark, one veilod sanctuary, around which the minds of men have watched, patiently as the Chaldean astronomer of old, these many centuries. Many a contrivance for raising the heavy curtains that are round about it has been invented. Many a fair guess and swift conjecture as to what would then be seen has come from the prolific wit of men. Yet so far there has been a charmed circle round it which science has not overpassed. It is the secret of being alive, the Sanctuary of Life. Will science ever make it known? Or is it a hiding-place too near Himself, that God should allow us to break into its august recess? *7

After this brief excursion into the physical sciences, let us return to our anchor, which is the thought of God's absolute dominion over us all. On this we are in the open sea as safe as if we were in harbour, and can ride out any storin. In all studies of this nature it is not so much God's wisdom and goodness and power, which we ought jealously to keep before us, as His Dominion. It is often a cheap homage to acknowledge His omnipotence; the true worship is to confess His Sovereignty.

often curiously illustrates the marvels in the lives of the saints. For instance, the following passage of the Abb6 Hanapier throws light on the bilocation of the saints, that is, their being in two places at once. "II faut reconnaitre avec le docteur Richerand que le fluide vital, ou si 1'on aime mieux, le principe de la vie, aninie, c'est-a-dire, vivifie chaque molecule vivante de notre corps, chaque organe, chaque systSme d'organes. D'aprfcs cette ve"ritg incontestable, on peut dire que nous avons deux corps: un, compose de matifire brute, et un autre compose de fluide vital, qui vivifie, qui organise celui composS de matiere brute. Ce corps, compose" de fluide vital, se comporte, dit le docteur Richerand, a la maniere d'un fluide." Hence, says he, those acute pains, felt by persons who have undertpne amputation, in the very limbs of which the amputation has deprived then).

We may compare these views with those put forward by Gorres in his Christliche Mystik, in the third chapter of the sixth book, entitled Der physische Grund aller d'amonischen Mystik sub-division B of letter D. Gegenseitige Beziige der Menschen zueinander. In one place he says, Der Leib ist also eine aus zweien Leiblichkeiten im Bande der dritten zusammengehaltene Doppelnatur; deren eine Obere dem gesammten Nervensysteme einwohnend, im Nervengeisto wirkt; die andere Untere mehr aus dem Blute geboren, im Umlaufsysteme sich auspragt; wahrend das Beide einende Band in den Muskelsystemen hervortritt. And again (the interest of the subject must excuse the length of the quotation), he says: Zwischen beiden Extremen liegen aber nun Mittelzustande zwischen inne, in deiien das BanJ sich lockert, ohne zu zerreissen, und in Gefologe der lofleren Biudung nun die beiden Naturen voneinanderlassend in EC-

Viva, in bis treatise on Beatitude,* has a passage on this subject which deserves to be written in letters of gold. He is striving to arrive at some theological principles by calculating the consequences of the famous hypothesis of Durandus, viz., the possibility of an essentially indestructible creature independently of any decree of God; and in answer to those who object that unless we grant the hypothesis, we limit God's power, he replies: " In oentricitat auseinanderweichen.Geschieht diese Losung aber also, dass die hohere vorbildliche durch Dberkraftigung sioh ablest von der unteren abbildlichen; und der Latenz sich entringend, in der Bic von ihr gehalten wird, iiber die selbe binausteigt, ohne jedoch ganz von ihr abzulassen; dann wird, wie das Wetterleuehten aus der iich kulenden Wolke, so das Spectrum aus der Umhulle frei, und in der Aufzuckung sichtbar. Also befreit, wird es aber, weil mil dem Gezweiten weniger verwickelt, in seiner Einheit gehobt, und somit also in all seinera Wirken mehr centrit. Centrirt aber, wie es nun ist, wird es dadurch zwar nicht allgegenwartig, was nur Gott zukommt, aber doch nach Maasgabe seiner Befreiung vielgegenwartig; im zugemessenen Kreise seiner Herschafft verscbwindet der Raurn] und es kann also ira ganzen Umfange desselben uberall zugegen seyn, wohin es sein Verlangen fixirt. Wie ee also in dem Tbeile, der noch mit der greiflichen Umhulle verwickelt ist, in ihr zugegen ru seyn fortfahrt; so ist es mit dem anderer mehr centrirten anderwahrts, und wird dort sichtbar in den Kraften und den Stoffen, die ihm zu Gebote stehen. Est ist den eine Art von Nebensonne,' die sich neben der wahren bildet; aber nicht durch Brechung in eincm fremden medium hervorgerufcn, sondern durch ein Sichselbstentriickteeyn der Personlichkeit bei beharrlichem Bleiben ia sich •elbst erwirkt; so jedoch, da*g die wahre Sonne im Spectrum gegeben ist, die Nebensonne aber in jenen Theil der Personlichkeit fallt, wo das Hohere noch ins Tiefere verwickelt, es mit getrubten Lichte durchbricbt. I am quite unable to pass any judgment ea Gorres' theory: to do so with any fairness, it would be necessary, first of all, to know anatomy, and to be able to compare his system with those most approved at present IB the French and other schools.

• Pars ii. Disp. I. Quaestio ix. 29 all doubts, then, whether creatures are possible which God cannot use for what uses He thinks fit, as a stone for thinking, we should incline to that side which seems most to favour the dominion of God over His creatures, rather than to that which magnifies His power, and not be anxious, at any expense, to enlarge the sphere of omnipotence. For, according to sane philosophy and theology the Divine Sovereignty is rather to be extended, for it is an attribute, by its very conception, more excellent than omnipotence." This canon of theologizing is of very wide application; and will often lead to much higher views of God than a man could attain by following the other lead. It is one of those pregnant germs of thought which have almost power of themselves to form a mind, and to expand themselves into a whole education.

Nothing can be plainer then than that these sciences are full to overflowing of God and of Divine Disclosures. Yet it is, I fear, plain also, that simply as an historical fact, they have not for the most part led to religious habits of mind or hearty submission to the will of God, even so far as they themselves make known His will. What is the cause of this? That they have been divorced from theology. And why has this divorce led to such results? Because, which is what I have all along been aiming at, all manifestations of God, like the Blessed Sacrament, are concealments also. Everywhere God is veiled; every where He works underground: everywhere He sets up a screen between Himself and the observation of His creature; everywhere search is the law of earth and vision the law of heaven: everywhere in this world to believe W to see, and seeing is not believing. This is God's way*

It pictures a divine Idea; and it is also, not best only for us, but simply necessary.

A comparison of the different views of nature will bring this home to us more plainly. Catholic tradition teaches us that the material creation is ruled and ad mmistered by the spiritual substances we call angels. St. Justin, Athenagoras, Theodoret, Clement of Alexandria, St. Gregory Nazianzen, Origen, Eusebius of Cesarea, St. Jerome. St. Austin, St. Hilary, St. Ambrose, St. Chrysostoin, St. Cyril, St. Gregory, and St. John Damascene, unite in witnessing to this; and they are followed by later theologians. It would probably therefore be not less than temerarious to call in question this old tradition. But nothing is fixed as to the manner or extent of this angelio administration. A view, however, once prevailed in the Church, taught by many doctors and sanctioned by the saints, which went so far as this: — that, as some in later days have taught that there is no such thing as real con. tact, but that all particles of matter exist in a subtle etherial fluid, or something of the nature of a fluid, so all the material universe is permeated by a subtle stream of immaterial, intellectual, personal angelic life, ruling, moving, managing, administering material laws to all things, so that God Himself is as it were hidden under this manycoloured veil of angelical operations. St. Thomas went so far as to teach that these angels were the fountains of all motion, or at least he represented them as fulfilling tho functions of the vortices of Descartes, and he argued against Aristotle, which is singular, as showing he was following some authority he thought stronger. Moreover, he infers, in his method of theologizing, that all these angels are of the single choir called in the Scriptures the Virtues.

This view kept its empire for long over the minds of men, and with greater or less modification it appears in the later schools of theology, as it still undoubtedly lives in the popular belief. It is to this that Milton alludes in the tenth book of Paradise Lost.

Such was their song: While the Creator, calling forth by name His mighty angels gave them several charge, As sorted best with present things. The sun Had first his precept so to move, to shine, As might afi'ect the earth with cold and heat Scarce tolerable, and from the north to call Decrepit winter; from the south to bring Solstitial summer's heat. To the blanc moon Her office they prescribed; to the other five Their planetary motions, and aspects, In sextile, square, and trine, and opposite, Of noxious efficacy, and when to join In synod unbenign; and taught the fixed Their influence malignant when to shower, Which of them rising with the sun, or falling, Should prove tempestuous. To the winds they set Their corners, when with bluster to confound Sea, air, and shore; the thunder when to roll With terror through the dark aerial hall. Some say, He bid His angels turn askance The poles of earth, twice ten degrees and more, From the sun's axle; they with labour pushed Oblique the centric globe.

Now, barring the idea of all motion proceeding from the angels, which according to modern liglits is at least a superfluous machinery, it does not seem that science can detect either the truth or the falsehood of this angelic theory, and there may be analogies and scriptural pre mises which may induce the theologian to accept it and habitually to regard nature from this point of view.* But I am not concerned with the truth or falsehood of the

  • De Maistre says somewhere, We shall soon laugh at those who twhile ago were laughing at the darkness of the Middle Ages. M. Calmiel, physician at the madhouse at Charenton, has written a book on the religious epidemics which have prevailed especially in Catholic monasteries, and the object of the book, which is not intentionally wicked, is to account for them all on the theory of hallucination and madness. He says that if we read all the theological books from the time of St. Louis to the time of Louis XIV. we shall be surprised to find the part assigned by theology and transcendental philosophy to supernatural beings. " This manner of interpreting the operations of nature evidently destroys, root and branch, the actual theory of the present day. Theologians could not help themselves. They threw themselves, a corps perdu, into the metaphysics of supernatural causes. They were tied by the very text of Scriptures; and besides, the number of particular facts which seemed to demonstrate or confirm the existence of these spiritual essences is almost frightening to the imagination." Yet mark his conclusion! " II faut done bien 1'avouer, au risque d'encourir le reproche de vouloir tirer la logique des th6ologiens du discr6dit ou elle est aujourdhui si justement tombe"e. Quand une fois on a admis se'rieusement (what is of faith to a Catholic) 1'existence d'un grand nombre d'etres spirituels, tout cet echafaudage de superstitions n'est pourtant pas aussi absurde qu'on est d'abord port6 si se le figurer. A ce compte il semblerait, que le plus grand tort des the"ologiens etait d'avoir outr6 les conse quences de la doctrine,.... et finalement on est bien force" de oonfesser que cette tbeorie ne pouvait paraitre que seduisante a de» spirituality renforc6s." (De la Folie, in various places.) In on« place he quotes a remarkable passage of the sceptical Bayle on th* same subject. It is in his article on Photinus. Je ne sais ce quk arrivera, uiais il me semble que, tot ou tard, on sera contiaint d'abandonner les principes me'eaniques, si on ne leur associe les volente*s de quelques intelligences, et franchement il n'y a pas d'hypothdse plus capable de donner raison des 6v6nements que celle qui admet un<4 telle association. Cuvicr speaking of certain fluids, says, We cannot yet decide whether these agents are really material; and M. de Lourdoueix (De la V6rit6, p. 350,) says, Nous croyona, nous que la maliere etant inerte de sa nature, ses agents sont vrairnent epiritueli theory. I wish to compare the habit of mind it forms with the habit of mind formed and disciplined on other methods of contemplating nature. God is hidden beneath this veil of angels, it is true ] they make a screen of wings around Him, as His seraphic train closed round His throne when Isaias saw Him in the temple " in the year that King Ozias died." But the screen is spiritual, living, personal, and leads at once to God. The angels are an object of holy fear because of their own great power and dazzling magnificence; and they are an object of holy love, even of fraternal love, because of their ad ministrative office towards ourselves, and because they are fellow servants with us under one Human Head. This method, therefore, of looking upon natural operation? was essentially religious, even supposing it were not true J though of course if it were not true, it was undesirable, aa no error can be desirable, however seemingly delectable its immediate fruits.

But nations, who had lost or who at least had hopelessly adulterated the primitive tradition, looked at nature in a different way from this. They watched its operations and saw that they were in themselves beautiful exceedingly. The poetry of the storm took them as in a snare. The tranquillity of the mountains and the woods ex hibited the hidden forces of mighty nature in almost adorable repose. The dome of starry sky above their pastoral plains was as the handwriting of divinity, bid ding them decipher in the mazy movements of the luminous orbs the secrets, not only of space and number, of et emanent du principe de forceet de mouvement, diversement modiHe" par le Verbe. From this, back again to the old-fashioned angelical theory how brief and easy the transition!

force and motion, but also of destiny and of futurity. How could that be a unity which was so multiform? What need of other gods than those energetic powers whose operations they beheld? Hence the first product of nature's beauty thus standing between God and man was idolatry. Nothing can be added to what the author of the Book of Wisdom says: "But all men are vain, in whom there is not the knowledge of God, and who by these good things that are seen, could not understand Him that is, neither, by attending to the works? have acknowledged who was the workman; but have imagined either the fire, or the wind, or the swift air, or the circle of the stars, or the great water, or the sun and moon, to be the gods that rule the world. With whose beauty if they being delighted took them to be gods, let them know how much the Lord of them is more beautiful than they: for the First Author of beauty made all those things. Or if they admired their power and their effects, let them understand by them, that He that made them is mightier than they. For by the greatness of the beauty, and of the creature, the Creator of them may be seen, so as to be known thereby. But yet as to these they are less to be blamed. For they perhaps err, seeking God, and desirous to find Him. For being conversant among His works they search; and they are persuaded that the things are good which are seen. But then again they are not to be pardoned. For if they were able t. know so much, as to make a judgment of the world: how did they not more easily find the Lord thereof? But Thou, our God, art'gracious and true, patient, and order ing all things in mercy. For if we sin, we are Thine, knowing Thy greatness: and if we sia not, we know that we are counted with Thee. For to know Thee is perfect justice; and to know Thy justice, and Thy power, is the root of immortality." * Thus it was because God's ope rations were His hiding-places, that men mistook them for Himself, and worshipped them; and yet because they made a " search" for Him, the inspired writer hesitates for a moment before he pronounces them unpardonable. Alas! we have not far to go to find some scientific trea tises whose spirit is far less respectable even than that of the old idolatry!

When the spirit of belief had begun to pass away from men outside the Church, their minds were in a very different condition from those of the primitive nations. It seemed as if till the fulness of time arrived, and our Lord had come, that there was some vital heat and energy supernaturally kept alive in the old but now distorted traditions, which had once been the chief inheritance of humanity. Just as all expectations, the world over, ceased they knew not why when Jesus had come, so all religiousness that was from any other source than His Cross died out of the heart of nations, and perished by degrees. Then it was that men who missed God did not fall into superstition, but into another kind of credulity, which is far more abject and more irreligious, and which substitutes belief in self for belief in Him. Thus, men whose intellects were not thoroughly informed with Christian doctrines gave themselves up to the passionate pur suit of the physical sciences. Investigation was its own reward: induction a life-long happiness: experiment a fascination: discovery a sort of beatific vision upon earth.8

Then, according to their bent of mind one of two things happened. In the one case second causes so dazzled them that they could not bear the steadfast act of vision required to contemplate the First Cause. Laws deceived them, as external operations deceived the old nations. God's own laws hid God. They were His hiding-place. It required a further search, and not of experiment but of faith, to find Him in His laws. Besides, law and order, succession and continuity, secular deflections of heavenly bodies and secular self-recoveries from such deflections, — all these things had a tendency to fix and rivet the mind upon themselves. Men began with a pious habit of finding out adaptations to human comforts everywhere; and so insensibly they became possessed with low and inadequate notions of God. When they came to phenomena which were inexplicable on that hypothesis, they could not conceive of God acting out of a pure love of law and order, and simply for His own glory; and they also came by degrees to forget that their intellects were not adequate measures even of their own discoveries, and that things done did not always, perhaps never altogether, disclose God's intentions in doing them. Hence even the doctrine of final causes was often handled irreverently: and is often now used with a sentimentality which is very far from worship or religion. But there was a step lower to which they could still descend. They could not only come to ignore God by throwing Him into the shade by His own laws; they could not only make His physical laws an antagonist power to His revealed will; but they could cast about in the most reckless and unscientific manner to get the most ungodly, tne undivinest theories they could, in order to secure themselves still more from the reach of religion. That a new view was more peremptory against religion than the old one was of itself its recommendation. The logic of a corrupt heart supplied the place of philosophic method. Science herself makes a mock of many of them now for this very thing. Men were amazed at Voltaire's views of the Chinese, and the marvellously exaggerated eulogies with which he put them before the admiring eyes of Europe. They did not see of what immense value to him was a picture of patriarchal virtues and chaste simplicity and noble duty altogether destitute of Christian light and grace. And can the civilized intelligence of modern times fall below Voltaire? At this day the Hegelians of Berlin and Paris, with their identity of Being and Non-Being, scout Voltaire as no better than. a " semi-Catholic/' Here is a metre by which we can measure much. But then, so it was of old, when the Eternal Wisdom of the Father came down from heaven, and let men gaze on Him and listen to Him; they took a long deliberate look into His Face, and said that He was beside Himself, and mad, and had a devil.

This was one way in which men were affected. But there were others who had so much of the religious or rather the poetic element in their minds, that they could not altogether rest in this sterile worship of laws and forces and secondary causes. There was not enough of intellectual ceremonial about it to suit their genius. They yearned to have God more near. They would have been mystics, if they had been Christians. Their eense of the vague and the mysterious needed satisfaction. Worship recommended itself to them artistically; and they wished, aesthetically, that everything could be divine

But at all costs the grasp of moral obligation was to be taken off them. Their worship was to be one of epicurean pleasure; and its smoothness would be marred if they were to put bit and bridle on the passions that thirsted for their ends. So God was near, was every where. He was closely by. We touched Him. We were ever walking in a most awful sanctuary. For God was melted down and commingled with nature. Every thing was God. We were a part of God ourselves. We were absorbed in Him; and as He was infinitely pure, BO we, being part of Him, could in nowise be defiled. Hence, the very presence of God was the security of sin, not its terror and prevention as with the Christian doc trine of His omnipresence. This theory took with young men It harmonized with lofty aspirations, without descending to undignified restraints. It was presentable in a literary point of view, and could be conveniently taught exoterically or esoterically, as suited its professors. And in a word, of all the forms of atheism, this positive pan theism was by far the most graceful, the most bewitching, the most persuasive, the least offending that could be; if for no other reason at least for this, that it got rid, once and for all, of the vulgarizing doctrine of sin. Thus did it insinuate itself into countless minds, by the help of an evil and narrow study of physical science, uncrowning God and deifying nature, until now one of the most popular writers of the day, having set forth the Beatific Vision, as little, self-seeking, and unworthy, cries, How much more consoling the thought of being solemnly reabsorbed into the bosom of Universal Things!

It was in this very point of view that Fenelon regarded the laws of creation, as so many hiding-places of God.

His words were quoted when we were speaking of Transubstantiation as the greatest work of God. Thus, in like manner, we find occasional theological expressions of physical science, as we may call them. It is the first law of motion that when a body moves, not acted upou by any force, it will go on perpetually in a straight line, and with a uniform velocity. Descartes was said to be the first philosopher who put it clearly before the world: and in casting about to find the laws of motion, he seems rather to have used his theology than his mechanics; for he discovers "the law in the immutability and simplicity of the operation by which God preserves motion in matter. For He only preserves it precisely as it is in that moment in which He preserves it, taking no account of that which may have been previously." Nothing can illustrate more beautifully the sensible immediateness of God to the mind of Descartes than this very reasoning: though an English philosopher very fairly complains of it as wanting in mechanical proof. So also the principle of least action was a theological expression of science Maupertius proved by h priori theological arguments,9 that all mechanical changes must take place in the world go as to occasion the least possible quantity of action. Mathematicians were irritated by his theology, but con fessed that mechanical proofs actually established his principle.")10 So also many writers in England, transferring to their pages the theories of others, especially of German and French philosphers, have almost unconsciously, out of what they thought to be a stronger Christian Cerise, given a theological colouring to them, which thc-y certainly do not possess in the originals: and which real theology by no means requires.

Now, what do the foregoing remarks amount to but this, that what between the two laws, of God's perfection and of our imperfections, so it is, that all God's revela tions of Himself are, in truth, concealments also? He is not visible, except He vouchsafes to stand back out of the light and put Himself in the shade. Thus, nature is in its measure a manifestation of Himself analogous to the Blessed Sacrament. Its laws are as the sacra mental accidents: they hide Him. He is nowhere in nature in His true dimensions; the littleness of nature is as the littleness of the Host. No one is obliged to see Him who will not see Him. No one can see Him at all without a moral preparation of heart. The very difficul ties of nature are used as weapons against God, just as the difficulties of the Blessed Sacrament are the grounds on which many reject the doctrine. There is the same liability to be mistaken in both, and the same apparent contradiction to the evidence of the senses, which we so often meet with in the truths of physical science, such as that the earth goes round the sun when we see the sun go round the earth, or as when we are told that the earth

Academy of Sciences in 1744, and the author died at Basle in 1759. lie maintained that his principle was a philosophical deduction from the doctrine of final causes. If, as I suspect, his Memoiro was prerious to his conversion, some may see in the attachment to the doc trine of final causes a symptom of a naturally religious inind which the friendship of Voltaire may have debauched.

is spinning round in every point of its surface with in credible velocity from west to east, and yet a ball dropped from a lofty tower, falls just at the foot of it, instead of being left behind or out-stripped by it. It seems contrary to our senses that the stone should have the earth's circular motion impressed upon it, as well as the downward motion to which the law of gravity compels it. The eccentricities and inequalities of planetary bodies answer to the phenomena which men deem imperfect and un worthy of God in the Blessed Sacrament. Meanwhile, they have treated nature in the same way as they have treated the Blessed Sacrament. The heresy which denies sacramental grace and affirms the consecrating principle to be in ourselves, is like to the error of those who rest in laws and secondary causes and in the conceptions of their own minds. The heresies which teach Consubstantiation, or the Impanation of our Lord,11 are analogous to pantheism, as we have recently described it: while those who profess to hold a Real Presence, and yet deny Transubstantiation, are in the condition of those who, from a scientific observation of nature, draw equally proofs in favour of a pure theism, and against the Christian revelation. Surely there is a marvellous parallel between God concealed under the laws and forces of nature, and God concealed under the veils" and accidents *f ths Blessed Sacrament.

Footnotes

  1. Cabanis however, in his Rapports du Physique et du Moral, maintains that Democritus invented and pursued the modern method. En un mot, il indiqua les experiences comme un nouveau moyen d'arriver a la verite; et seul parmi les anciens, il pratiqua constamraent cet art qui depuis a fait presque tous les succes et la gloire des modernes. Memoire Premier, p. 68, Edit, de Peisse. It has been well remarked by a recent writer that the old-schoolmen who argued "ab actu ad posse," in reality treated observations with more respect than modern science has often done, whose very device and motto is observation and experience. Speaking of indubitable facts in psychology, which go towards a demonstration of the supernatural, and of the way in which modern science ignores what will not fit in with its preconceived theories, and of science especially as manifested in Academies and Associations, he says that science took its stand on observation, and it is precisement a partir de ce moment que Ton a commence a biffer tous les faits qui gcnaient, et a jeter au feu les observations de tous les siecles. De MirviUe. Les Esprits, p. 336, note. ↩

  2. See Cuvier's Revolutions sur la Surface de la Terre. Both the conflicting theories of Catastrophe and Uniformity lead equally to this conclusion. ↩

  3. It is a mistake to suppose that the doctrine of the demiurgic days being indefinite periods, and not solar days, has been forced upon theology by modern discovery. St. Augustin mentions it in the 20th Book of the City of God, cap. II. Bossuet calls the dayi "six different progresses," in his 5th Elevation on the Mysteries. Nicolas, in his Etudes Philosophiques, liv. ii. c. II. also quotes S. Athanasius, Orat Cont Arian. n. 60, and Origen, Do Princip. iv. 16, et cont. Celsum, vi. 50, 61, in the same sense. Indeed, as has been observed, the Sacred Text itself eeems to require some such interpretation, when it it said, "These are the generation of the heaven and the earth, when they were created in the day that the Lord God made the heaven and the earth:" to say nothing of the division of day and night being made part of the fourth day's work. ↩

  4. Any one, who has followed the controversy about the Plurality of Worlds, must have been struck with this thought, — How many puzzles and perplexities would have been saved to these writers, if they had been acquainted with the Tractatus de Deo of Catholic theology! Places may be pointed out in the Essay on the Plurality of Worlds, in Sir D. Brewster, in Mr. Montague Lyon Phillips, and In Dr. Lardner's Museum, where a knowledge of the Christian dootrine of God would have been a welcome auxiliary to the authors. Bo true is that experience of converts to the Catholic faith that the change wrought in their minds by their conversion is not so much to the belief of new doctrines, such as Transubstantiation, Purga tory, and the Devotion to Mary, but in new knowledge of the Divine Perfections, and a more comprehensive as well as more inti. mate view of God. ↩

  5. Bacon says that final causes so far from being useful in the sci ences corrupt them, except in what concerns the actions of men. Novum Organon. L 2, aph. 2; and again, De Atigmentia Scientiarum, lib. 3, cap. 5, he says, The research of final causes is barren, and like a virgin consecrated to God, bears no fruit. Descartes, while acknowledging the existence of final causes, seems to maintain that they are inaccessible to us. Principes de la Philosophic, iii. 2-3. Leibnitz asserts that final causes will not help us to the demonstration of a law in the science of nature, even while he says that every thing in physics must be deduced from final causes. Lettre a M. Bayle. Geoffroy St. Hilaire says, The doctrine of final causes, at least in the way in which it has been handled for centuries, has had its day in zoology. Those who adopt these doctrines find their greatest difficulty in physiology, where our knowledge of efficient causes is so very limited. It is intelligible that to those who are not children of an infallible church, physical science detached from the doctrine of final causes should appear simply terrible, as lending them they know not where, and unfastening all notions of religion, In this, as in the other domains of intellectual research, Catholic* may be more fearless and more free. ↩

  6. See De Bonald on the origin of language in his Legislation Primitive. ↩

  7. The modern investigations into the principle of life touch, as might be expected, on many interesting theological questions; but none seem either to countenance the old error of two souls, or to impugn the words of the Council of Trent, Anima rationalis es forma corporid. But modern physiology, with ita "doublure psychique/" ↩

  8. Cap. xiiL ↩

  9. Whewell, Hist, of Inductive Sciences, ii. 121. ↩

  10. It seems strange to give Maupertius credit for a theological turn. Nevertheless, in his latter years he was converted, lived religiously, underwent great raillery with much courage, and published a work to show that the "religion of Jesus Christ is the true happiness of man." I do not know the exact date of his conversion; but the Meinoire.•'ur la moindre Quantit6 d'Action was read at the ↩

  11. Luther taught the first, Osiander the second. ↩

Chapter 20 of 31