Lecture I. The Revolt of the Intellect against God

' But yet the Son of Man, when He cometh, shall He find, think you, faith on earth T St. Luke xviii. 8.

By this question our Divine Lord intends us to understand that, when He comes, He shall find many who do not believe, many who have fallen from the faith. It foretells that there shall be apostasies; and if apostasies, therefore that He shall still find the truth; but He will find also those that have fallen from it. And this is what the Holy Ghost, speaking by the Apostle, has distinctly prophesied. St. Paul says, * Now the Spirit manifestly saith that, in the last times, some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to spirits of error, and doctrines of devils.'1 And again, St.

1 1 Tim. iv. 1.

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John says, ' Little children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that Antichrist cometh, even now there are become many Antichrists, whereby we know that it is the last hour.'2 The meaning therefore of our Lord is this; not that when He comes He will not find the Church He founded in all the plenitude of its power, and the faith He revealed in all the fulness of its doctrine. ' The city seated upon the hill cannot be hid.' The Holy Catholic Church is the ' light of the world/ and so shall be to the end. It can never be separated from its Divine Head in heaven. The Spirit of Truth, who came on the day of Pentecost, according to our Divine Lord's promise, will abide with it for ever: therefore when the Son of God shall come at the end of the world, there shall be His Church as in the beginning, in the amplitude of its Divine authority, in the fulness of its Divine faith, and the immutability of its teaching. He will find then the light shining in vain in the midst of many who will be willingly blind; the teacher in the midst of multitudes, of whom many will be willingly deaf: they will have eyes, and see not; and ears, and hear not; and hearts that

2 1 St. John ii. 18.

will not understand. As it was at His first coming, so shall it be at His second. This, then, is the plain meaning of our Lord's words.

And now, before I enter upon this subject, I wish to say a word of a superstition which, strange to say, pervades those who are willing to believe but little else. For in its incredulity the human mind is liable to fall into the greatest of all credulities; and one credulous superstition of these days is this: That faith and reason are at variance; that the human reason, by submitting itself to faith, becomes dwarfed; that faith interferes with the rights of reason; that it is a violation of its prerogatives, and a diminution of its perfection. Now I call this a pure superstition; and those who pride themselves upon being men of illumination and of high intellect, or, as we have heard lately, in the language of modern Gnosticism, 'men of culture,' are, after all, both credulous and superstitious.

God, who is the perfect and infinite intelligence— that is, the infinite and perfect reason — created man to His own likeness, and gave him a reasonable intelligence, like His own. As the face in the mirror answers to the face of the beholder, so the intelligence of man answers to the intelligence of God. It is His own likeness. What, then, is the revelation of faith, but the illumination of the Divine reason poured out upon the reason of man? The revelation of faith is no discovery which the reason of man has made for himself by induction, or by deduction, or by analysis, or by synthesis, or by logical process, or by experimental chemistry. The revelation of faith is a discovery of itself by the Divine Reason, the unveiling of the Divine Intelligence, and the illumination flowing from 'it cast upon the intelligence of man; and if so, I would ask, how can there be variance or discord 1 How can the illumination of the faith diminish the stature of the human reason 1 How can its rights be interfered with? How can its prerogatives be violated'1? Is not the truth the very reverse of all this? Is it not the fact that the human reason is perfected and elevated above itself by the illumination of faith 1

There have been three periods of the human reason in the history of mankind. The first period was when the reason of man wandered alone, without revelation, as we see in the heathen world, and most especially in the two most cultivated races of the heathen world; I mean Greek and the Roman. The second period waa that in which the human reason, receiving the light of revelation, walked under the guidance of faith; that is to say, by the revelation of God of old to His prophets, and by His revelation through the incarnation of His Son in Christianity. Lastly, there is a period setting in — not for the whole world, not for the Church of God, but for individuals, races, and nations — of a departure from faith, in which the human reason will have to wander once more alone, without guide or certainty; not indeed as it did before, but, as I shall be compelled hereafter to show, in a worse state, in a state which is in truth a dwarfing and a degradation of the human intelligence.

The first state, then, in which the reason of man wandered without revelation was the state of the heathen world. They had no knowledge of God, except by an obscured tradition, which came dimly from the beginning. But the condition of the human reason under faith is an elevated and a nobler state. No man can read the Old Testament— the Book of Psalms, the Book of Proverbs, to say nothing of the prophetical books of the

Old Testament — without perceiving at once that, in the most elaborate literature of Greece and Rome, there is nothing which, for intellectual elevation, refinement, and power, is comparable with them. When we come on to the period of Christianity, I may say, in one word, that the history of the progress and the perfection of the human intellect is the history of Christianity itself; and that Christianity has elevated, cultivated, developed, invigorated, and perfected the human intellect. Apart from all hopes of eternal life, and in its mere effect on this world, upon man as man, as a rational being, faith has been his elevation. Lastly, we come to that period of which it is my purpose now to speak. St. Paul, writing to the Thessalonians, says: ' Be not easily moved from your mind, nor be frighted, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by epistle, as sent from us, as if the day of the Lord were at hand;' because, he says, that it shall not come * unless there come a revolt first, and the man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition, who opposeth, and is lifted up above all that is called God, or that is worshipped.'3

3 2 Thess. ii. 2-4.

Now, I am not going to enter into the question of when that day will come; that is not a part of the message committed to me. Neither am I going to enter into an exposition of unfulfilled prophecies about the man of sin. But out of this epistle I take one word and one idea. Before that day comes there shall be 'a revolt.' Now, a revolt means a rebellion, a rising, a casting-off of obedience, and the- erection of a self-constituted authority in its place. I will try to bring before you the signs and marks of this rising or revolt of the intellect of men that were once Christians, and to show that the intelligence of Christian nations has, in these last ages, begun to manifest the phenomena and signs of a departure from faith, which, though it can in no way affect the immutability, stability, and imperishable certainty of the revelation of truth, any more than blindness can cloud the sun at noon-day, nevertheless shows that there is a current carrying the minds of men away from faith in Christ and in God into the darkness of unbelief.

1. First of all, there exists at this day, and there has existed for two centuries, a certain number of men — few indeed — who profess themselves to be

Atheists, or not to believe the existence of God. 1 am sorry to say we have among us a certain number of such men who, by their speeches and writings, profess this, which I must call not only a blasphemous but a stupid impiety. I call it stupid for this reason. A man whom Englishmen are fond of calling the greatest philosophical intellect that England ever produced, in one of his essays has used these words. Quoting the Book of Psalms, he says, ' The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.' It is not said, * The fool hath thought in his heart:' that is, the fool did say so in his heart, because he hoped there might be no God. He did not say it in his head, because he knew better. And this explanation is exactly what the Apostle has written, speaking of the ancient world: ' The invisible things of Him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made: His eternal power also and divinity: so that they' (that is, the nations who know not God) ' are inexcusable;' ' for, professing themselves to be wise, they became fools/4 And he goes on to explain the reason of it; ' as they liked not to have God in their knowledge:' they had no « Rom. i. 20, 22.

love, no liking for Him; there was no moral sympathy with His perfections of purity, justice, mercy, sanctity, and truth. These things were out of harmony with their degraded nature; and because they had no love to retain this knowledge of a pure and holy God, therefore their intellects were darkened. And yet, notwithstanding all this, even these, who not knowing God, and not glorifying Him as God, worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, these were not Atheists. So far from it, they were Polytheists: they believed in a multitude of gods. So profoundly rooted in human nature was a belief in God, that when they lost the knowledge of the one only true God, they multiplied for themselves a number of false gods. The human mind was incapable of conceiving the perfection of the one only true God, and it divided the Divine idea into a multitude of gods; but it was so profusely and instinctively filled with the notion of the existence of God, that it multiplied God, instead of rejecting His existence. The heathen world, therefore, is a witness and a testimony to the existence of God. It became superstitious, credulous, anything you will, but atheistic it could not be. Nay, more than this: even the learned men, the more refined and the more cultivated, they also did not reject the notion of God; they became Pantheists, that is to say, they invested everything with divinity. The thought of God was so kindred to their nature, it had such a response in them, their intellect and their conscience testified with such constant accord to the reasonableness of believing in God, or in gods, that they invested all things round about them with a participation in the Divine nature. How, then, has it come to pass that men, in these last times, after receiving the illumination of the Faith, and knowing ' the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom He has sent,' knowing Him in His perfections, in His attributes, and by His works and grace, — that they should have fallen lower, I must say, than even the heathen world, that they should have come to deny the very existence of God I

They are, indeed, few in number; but, nevertheless, they are active and full of zeal to propagate their opinions. In France there exists a school of Atheism which has a few disciples also in England; I mean the Positivist school of philosophy. The founder of it, Comte, taught that the human intellect has three periods: the first is the period of childhood, the second is the period of youth, and the third the period of manhood. Now, it says the period of childhood is the theological period, in which the human reason believes in gods or in God. The second period of the human reason is that which the founder of this school of philosophy calls the metaphysical period; and here is a refinement well worthy of note. He says, when men are men, they give up the superstition of believing in God; nevertheless, they fall into the -superstition of believing in cause and effect, in law and principle, that is, in the metaphysical conceptions which are intrinsic through the inevitable action of the human reason. He treats these as superstitions. As the belief in God was a theological superstition, so the belief in cause and effect, and consequence, and principle, and law — all this is a metaphysical superstition. Well, the third state of the human reason, which is the perfect state of manhood, in what does it consist? In believing that which we can see, feel, touch, handle, test, weigh, measure, or analyse by chemistry. We may test the facts, but we must not connect them together. We must not say that one thing follows after another by a law, or is caused by it.

An explosion of fire-damp is not caused by the candle being carried into the pit; it follows after the carrying of it into the pit, but it is a metaphysical superstition to believe that it is caused by it. This is what is called the scientific state of the human mind. And this scientific state of the human mind is when, having pushed over the horizon and out of sight the idea of God, the idea of cause and effect, of law and principle, and all mental philosophy, we are reduced to this — that we may count and number and distinguish the things we see as phenomena and facts, but we must not connect them together, we must not form conceptions as to why they follow one upon another. And this is Science, the perfection of human reason! The immediate result of this, of necessity, is Atheism. I would ask, Is this the elevation of the human reason? Does this Philosophy dignify, or perfect, or exalt, or unfold it, or confer upon it knpwledge greater than it had before? If there can be anything which dwarfs, and stunts, and diminishes, and distorts the human reason, it is this. Atheism, then, is a lower abasement of the intellect than was ever reached by the heathen world. More than this, it is a degradation and distortion of the human intelligence; and in proportion as the human intelligence departs from the knowledge of God, in that same degree it departs from its own perfection. Nevertheless, this school does exist among us; and this is the first form, or rather the worst form, of the revolt of the intellect, because it is the revolt of the intellect from God altogether, from His existence, and from all that He has made known to us by the light of revelation, and even from that which He has made known to us by the light of nature, which is the light of reason.

2. Secondly, there is another and a modified form of this revolt. There are men (and I am sorry to say they are more numerous than the last) who, though they do not reject the existence of God, do nevertheless reject the knowledge of God; that is, they profess to believe in a God, because they see with all mankind (except a few who are isolated and abnormal) that the light of reason, the light of nature itself, obliges a man to believe in a first cause, and that this first cause must be a personal cause, an intelligence, and a will. To doubt of this is, as I said before, to be an anomaly in the rational order of man. But, while these men believe in a God of nature, nevertheless they reject the revelation which He has given them of Himself. And how did they come to this state 1 Not all at once. They came by progressive stages; and I protest that, in what I am about to say, I say it in a sorrow which I cannot put in words, still more, without the least tinge of controversy; because the longer I live, and the more I see of the state of our own country, the less am I disposed to utter one word which can make wider the unhappy divisions which exist among those who still believe in Christianity as a Divine revelation. Nevertheless, I must tell the truth. The first cause of Rationalism (that is, the rejection of Christianity in the present day) was the rejection of the Divine authority of the Church of Jesus Christ three hundred years ago: and that by a law of production so legitimate, by an intellectual law so certain, that, I think, any one who would give himself sufficient time and apply sufficient industry to follow the history of unbelief in the last three hundred years would see it to demonstration. When, three hundred years back, certain nations in the north and west of Europe had rejected the authority of the Church as a Divine teacher, they immediately began to examine the human evidences upon which the doctrines of Christianity reposed. Christianity can only rest either upon a Divine authority — that is, a Divine basis of certainty — or upon a human and historical basis. Having rejected the Divine authority, or the Divine basis, they had nothing left to them but the human and historical basis; and that human and historical basis was the history of Christianity as found in the inspired books of Holy Scripture and in the works of uninspired writers. They began to apply human reason to criticise, to test, to measure the credibility, both extrinsic and intrinsic, of every article of the Faith. I say, first, the extrinsic credibility; that is, whether it could be historically proved that this or that doctrine was believed in the beginning and has been believed ever since: secondly, the intrinsic credibility; that is to say, whether this or that doctrine was in itself reconcilable with the human reason. And applying this critical test, they rejected doctrine after doctrine. We all know how many fragmentary Christianities sprung from what was called the Reformation, differing from each other; the German form of the Reformation differing from the English, the

English differing from the Scotch, and the Swiss from both. These fragmentary Christianities were so many exhibitions of the criticism of the human reason working out for itself what seemed to be credible or probable as to the original revelation of God.

It was not difficult to foresee that one man would go farther than another, that one would reject more than another; and that one man would begin early in life believing a great deal more than he believed at the end of it, and therefore that all things would be in a perpetual flux of mutation and uncertainty; so that for three hundred years the amount of Christianity that has been believed on this human and critical basis has been perpetually diminishing, and the residuum which is left upon that foundation now is incalculably less than that with which men started three hundred years ago. I hardly like to go into positive proofs of this, for fear of wounding where I desire to leave no wound; but it is only this last week when, in one of the highest places of this realm, evidence was quoted from a most unsuspicious and impartial correspondent, writing from Germany, who declared the state of religious belief in that country to be such that neither Rome nor Luther would recognise it as Christianity. And yet that was a country in which, only three hundred years ago, before the intellectual revolt against the Divine authority of Faith arose, Christianity was once perfect. Of England, I had rather not speak at all. I pray every day of my life for England. I never say the Holy Mass without praying earnestly that light may be poured out over England, and that the eyes of men may be purged of their film, to see that they are contending one with another to the destruction of their common inheritance; and that we may one day be all united again, in the unity of the only Faith as it is in Jesus. This is my prayer, and I desire most earnestly to refrain from saying a word which can cause the least estrangement in any one who hears me. But is it not undeniable that at this moment Christianity in England is being undermined 7 Is it not certain that Rationalism in every form, whether speculative and cultivated, or gross and vulgar, is, in every generation that passes, expanding and establishing itself more widely among the people of England? Moreover, I am old enough to know that, forty years ago, men believed more c than they believe now, that doctrines were then held as indisputable which are now openly disputed.

The rejection of the Divine authority necessarily throws men upon the only alternative — human criticism applied to Scripture, to antiquity, to Fathers, to history, to Councils, and to the acts of the Holy See. There is nothing on the face of the earth which the human reason does not claim to subject to itself, to sit in judgment upon, to test as if it were the creation of man, to decide its credibility as if man were the measure of truth, to pronounce upon whetherit be Divine or not. The result of this anarchy of criticism is, that multitudes of men have rejected Christianity altogether: men, whom but a few years ago I knew firmly to believe in Christianity, are now, to my -Certain knowledge, Rationalists. They now believe nothing of Christianity, because, having applied the false principle of human criticism to the matter of Divine revelation, they have logically and consistently carried out the application of a false premiss, to the destruction of Christianity altogether. The premiss is false, its result is logical.

Let us now apply to this subject the teaching of the Syllabus. Two of the errors condemned in it are,

1st. i That the human reason, without any regard to the revelation of God, is the sole and sufficient judge of truth and of falsehood, of right and of wrong, and is a law of itself and in itself, sufficient for the welfare of individuals and of states.'

2d. ' That the human reason is the source of all the truths of religion.'5

In the beginning of the last century, there was a book written called Christianity as old as the Creation. I need not tell you that that book contained no Christianity. It denied all supernatural revelation, and professed to show that all truth was in the natural reason of man. If we should desire to see the fruit of these principles, we may go back to the end of the last century. See what Paris was in the year 1793; see what Paris is again in the year 1871. Tell me whether the human reason, without Christianity, is a law of itself, and the sole judge of truth and falsehood, and of right and wrong, and suificient for the welfare of individuals and of states. It was only

5 Syllabus, Prop. iii. iv.

yesterday I read in a public despatch from Paris, that the Commune had decreed that all religious teaching should cease in the schools. We know that the churches, which a short time ago were employed for sacred uses, are now political clubs, in which, in the course of the last ten days, death was unanimously voted to the chief pastor of that Christian city. These are the fruits of the rejection of Christianity. Such, then, is the second step in the revolt of the intellect — the revolt which begins with the rejection of the Divine authority of the Church of God, and then goes on to reject evidences, next to reject doctrines, and lastly to reject Christianity.

3. The third kind of intellectual revolt, and it is the last ot which I will speak, in respect to those who are without, is a form of false philosophy, which in the Syllabus is described as ' moderate' Rationalism, as compared with that of which we have been hitherto speaking, which is there called ' absolute' Rationalism. Now the moderate Rationalism consists in this: in the retaining a belief of Christianity, or the professing to believe it; but the believing of it only so much as, upon private c^Hicism and its own judgment, the individual mind is disposed to retain. But is it not obvious at once that the human reason can only stand related to the revelation of God, either as a critic, or as a disciple in the presence of a Divine Teacher? The moment the human reason begins to criticise, to test, to examine, to retain, or to reject, it has ceased to be a disciple; it has become the critic; it has ceased to be the learner, it has become the judge; and yet find me, if you can, any middle point where the reason of man can stand between the two extremes of sub-mitting to the Divine authority of faith as a disciple, and of criticising the whole revelation of God as a judge. There is nothing between the two. Now this kind of intellectual revolt (I must call it by a hard name, but it is an old one, and used by the Apostles) is heresy. What is the meaning of heresy 1 It means the choosing for ourselves, as contra-distinguished from the receiving with docility from the lips of a teacher — the choosing for ourselves what we will believe and how much we will believe. St. James says, * Whosoever shall keep the whole law, but offend in one point, is become guilty of all;'6 and that, for this reason: He that c St. James ii. 10.

LIBRARY ST. fMRY'S COLLEGE said, Thou shalt not kill, said also, Thou shalt not steal; but if I steal my neighbour's goods without taking his life, I violate the Divine authority which runs through both the commandments. In the same way, he who shall believe all the articles of faith, and yet reject one of them, in that rejection rejects the whole Divine authority upon which all the articles of faith alike depend. This spirit of criticism begins, as I said before, in the rejection of the principle of Divine authority and the adoption of private judgment, which is essentially, though at first covertly, a violation of that Divine authority. The human reason thereby unconsciously assumes to itself to be the test and the measure of that which is to be believed. For instance; in interpreting Holy Scripture, if I interpret the Book according to the light of my individual judgment, the interpretation that I attach to it is my own. The text may be Divine, but the interpretation is human. And this must be, wheresoever the Divine authority of the Church is not recognised as a principle of faith. You know how the rejection of this Divine authority has shattered the unity of faith in England. I say this, as I said before, with sorrow. I do not charge all those who are out of the unity of the Catholic faith with heresy. The English people are indeed in heresy, but I do not call them heretics. God forbid! They were born into that state of privation. They found themselves disinherited. They have never known their rightful inheritance. They have grown up, believing what has been set before them by parents and by teachers; their state of privation has been caused by the sin of others three hundred years ago, and by no act of rejection of their own. The millions of our people, the children, the unlearned, the simple, the docile, the humble, the wives and mothers and daughters, the great multitude who live lives of prayer and of charity and of mutual kindness, who never had the opportunity of knowing the truth — to call them heretics would be to wound charity. They have never made a perverse election against the truth; and I heartily believe that millions of them, if the light of the Catholic Church were sufficiently before them, would, as multitudes have done in every age, forsake all things to take up their cross and follow their Master.

4. I must now make application of what I have said, more nearly to ourselves. What I am going to add, I address most especially to those who are of my flock.

We live in a country which for three hundred years has been pervaded by a spirit of opposition to the Catholic Church. Everything round about us is full of antagonism to the Faith. The whole literature of this country is written by those who, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes consciously, assume an attitude of hostility to it. I say, sometimes unconsciously, because, being born in that state, they often do so without being aware that they have received an heirloom of false principles and of false histories respecting the Holy Catholic Church. Without knowing it, they are perpetually incorporating them with what they write; so that the greater part of the literature of this country, which is in the hands of us all, contains a systematic contradiction of that which we believe. The newspapers, which fill the whole country, day by day are animated by a spirit which is against us; and they are filled by details, and narratives, and correspondence, and they must forgive me if I say, fables, fictions, fabrications, absurdities — anything that can pander to the morbid appetite, to the craving for scandals against Catholic institutions, Catholic priests, Catholic nuns. Only the other day we read attacks against certain nuns in Paris which, for studied but transparent falsehood, were worthy of the Commission of Henry VIII. How is it possible that Catholics can read these things day by day, and their eyes, and imaginations, and hearts receive insensibly no stain from them? They who walk in the sun cannot help being tanned. You go to and fro in the midst of all this literature and all these daily calumnies, you breathe this atmosphere charged with untruths — how is it possible that you should be unaffected by them? Do we not frequently hear Catholics say: * Am I to believe this?' 'Can I contradict itf 'If it be not contradicted, there must be some truth in it.* Little by little it gets into the minds of men with, 'I suppose, then, it cannot be denied;' * Where there is smoke there is fire.' In this way, falsehoods are insinuated. They are either never contradicted, or the contradiction is never published, or if published, hardly seen. The slander has done its work, and the stain remains. We live where Catholics are few, where those who are not Catholics are the great multitude;

we are bound up with them in kindred, in affinity, in friendship, in business, in duty, in society. It is impossible that we should not live amongst them, work with them, and have friendships with them. Charity obliges us to converse with them, and we hear much that certainly does not tend to confirm the faith. There was growing up in the minds of some men a disposition, which, I am happy to say, is nearly cast out again, to diminish and to explain away, to understate and reduce to a minimum that which Catholics ought to believe and to practise. This spirit began in Germany. It says: ' I believe everything which the Church has defined. I believe all dogmas; everything which has been defined by a General Council.' This sounds a large and generous profession of faith; but they forget that whatsoever was revealed on the day of Pentecost to the Apostles, and by the Apostles preached to the nations of the world, and has descended in the full stream of universal belief and constant tradition, though it has never been defined, is still matter of Divine faith. Thus there are truths of faith which have never been defined; and they have never been defined because they have never been contradicted.

: They are not defined because they have not been denied. The definition of the truth is the fortification of the Church against the assaults of unbelief. Some of the greatest truths of revelation are to this day undefined. The infallibility of the Church has never been defined. The infallibility of the Head of the Church was only defined the other day. But the infallibility of the Church, for which every Catholic would lay down his life, has never been defined until now; the infallibility of the Church is at this moment where the infallibility of the Pope was this time last year: an undefined point of Christian revelation, believed by the Christian world, but not yet put in the form of a definition. When, therefore, men said they would only believe dogmas, and definitions by General Councils, they implied, without knowing it, that they would not believe in the infallibility of the Church. But the whole tradition of Christianity comes down to us on the universal testimony and the infallibility of the Church of God; which, whether defined or not, is a matter of Divine faith. I will make application of what I have said when I sum up the argument I am stating. Next, people began to say: ' I can admit that the Head of the Church has a supreme authority, but that authority is not without its limits, and the limits are here and there/ Now who, I ask, can limit the jurisdiction of a supreme authority 1 Who can prescribe the limits of any jurisdiction but one who in authority is superior to him who holds the. jurisdiction 1 This spirit of insubordination was coming in amongst us; it has no existence now, because the Council of last year struck it dead. I should have thought that a generous heart, filled with the love of God, would have desired to know more and more of Divine truth, and would have said, 'Let me know everything which God has revealed, let me have the fullest and the amplest knowledge,' rather than be jealous and niggardly in limiting the growth of that knowledge.

5. Lastly, and this is the only other point I will at present touch on, the effect of such an atmosphere as that we live in, breathing all the day long the cold air of a country which for three hundred years has been opposed to the Holy Catholic Faith, is to produce that which must be called practical unbelief, even in many who would lay down their lives for the dogmas of the Faith. And that practical unbelief is this: their faith resides in their intellect whole and perfect, but it is cold and unenergetic in their life, and it does not govern and mould the- character and the will. They get acclimatised to the temperature round about them. You all know how we become acclimatised to a foreign country, how we can learn the habits and the language and the accent of a foreign people. Such is the state of many who intellectually retain their faith, but practically seem not to believe. They become, for instance, unconscious of the Communion of Saints, of the presence of God, of the operation of the unseen world, of the working of the Holy Spirit of God in the Church, and of the personal agency and subtlety of the enemy of truth. I have given these last two examples, because they are the two stealthy and secret approaches whereby the enemy of truth first assails those who sincerely believe. When opening his trenches against the faith of those who never doubted, he begins with the least noise, and under cover.

I will now sum up what I have said. The revolt of the intellect against God is against His existence, or against His revelation, or against His Divine authority. And there are the two stealthy and incipient forms of intellectual revolt to which Catholics are tempted; the one of diminishing what they believe to a minimum, the other in reducing to the least that which they are bound to submit to in point of authority, or to practise in point of devotion.

I can make but one application of what has been said. Two years ago, when the (Ecumenical Council was summoned to meet in Rome, immediately through all European countries, both those which are within the unity of the Church and those which are separated from it, there arose a conspiracy against the Council. Men of the character I have been describing, with those called ' liberal Catholics,' and, strange to say, Christians of all sects, and Israelites not a few, revolutionists, rationalists, chiefly out of the Church, but some within it, professors, declaimers, secret political societies, discontented and fractious minds already out of harmony with authority and the Church in all parts of Europe, combined against the Vatican Council. This general conspiracy strove, by correspondence, and by articles, pamphlets, and newspapers, to avert one thing, which all alike instinctively felt to be fatal to their pretensions. They all alike feared lest the infallible authority of the Head of the Church should be defined as a doctrine of faith. An unerring instinct taught them that such a definition would require of critics the submission of disciples. They were perfectly right; so perfectly right, indeed, that those who desired to see this definition made, desired it for the same explicit reason for which others opposed it. It was well known on either side that we were contending for the Divine authority of faith — the world against it, the Church for it — and that the axe was- laid to the root of the tree. The conflict was not for this doctrine or that doctrine, nor for a fragment in detail, but for the Divine certainty of' the whole. Well, that opposition was encouraged, flattered, countenanced by the favour of governments and diplomatists, statesmen and philosophers. All the newspaper press and the whole public opinion of the world was united against the Vatican Council. It tried to write it down, to make it ridiculous, to hold it up to contempt; men staked their literary credit and their authority over men upon the issue of the effort to turn the Vatican Council aside from its purpose, and to hinder it from doing its work. I am not stu> prised that no little disappointment should be in the minds of those who so conspired. I arn not the least surprised at their saying and writing sharp and bitter things against us; for a more complete overthrow of a very powerful conspiracy was never seen. Well, that being over, we next heard that after publication of the definition, in every Catholic country, I know not how many bishops, how many priests, how many professors, how many learned men, how many of the Catholic laity, were to rise up to begin a new reformation, We held our peace; we knew better. The time was not come. Words do little; events do everything. We waited. What is the result 1 Every bishop of the Church of God acknowledges the authority of that (Ecumenical Council. If there be here and there a priest who does not acknowledge its authority, they may be counted on your fingers. I do indeed hear of a professor here and there; but it is not all learned men that are professors, and it is not all professors that are learned men. Among the bishops and among the priests of the Church there are many profound theologians who have never sat in a professor's chair. It is not the habit that makes the monk, nor is it the title of professor that makes the learned man; and many that have never sat in the chair of a professor are more profoundly learned than many who have; and there are many sitting in those chairs who, to speak with profuse respect, are not learned. If, therefore, I find that in Germany some professors have been making declarations against the Council, that does not surprise, still less alarm, me. It is against this same rationalistic spirit — that is, the pretensions of perverted intellect — that the whole pontificate of Pius IX. has contended. And it was perfectly foreseen, that the moment this intellectual Gnosticism was touched, it would rise; and the rising has been incomparably less than was expected.

There never was a General Council of the Church after which there followed less of contradiction. After the great Council of Nice, Arianism became a formal heresy which afflicted the Church for centuries. After the Council of Ephesus, Nestorianism became a formal heresy which is not extinct at this day. After the Council of Constance, the spirit of national insubordination sowed the seeds of Gallicanism, which was only extinguished last year in the Vatican Council. Aftei*

D the Council of the Vatican, or at least its first sessions, it is no surprise that a handful of professors in Germany should rise up against it; and when I analyse the list and find out who these professors really are, I am still farther from surprise. There are, I believe, only two professors oi theology; but we find professors of botany, mineralogy, chemistry, anatomy, physic, and of I know not what. The other day we saw an address from the University of Rome to an aged and celebrated professor at Munich. Well, there came an address from the University of Rome; and there went up a cry of exultation in England, that even within sight of the windows of the Vatican, Rome had protested against the Vatican Council. I have to-day read the names of the men who signed that address: and I find that they were, with hardly an exception, men intruded by the Italian Government since last September, and that they style themselves professors of botany, of mineralogy, of chemistry, of surgery, and one describes himself as professor of Veterinary Pathology.

Before the Council met, a great preacher in France, whose natural gifts had filled the land with his fame, in an evil hour lifted up the eloquent voice which God had given him, against the Vicar of Jesus Christ. Where is he now? Lost, powerless, unknown.

The venerable professor in Germany — more learned, indeed, in history sacred and profane, than either in Christian philosophy or in theology, the founder of a school and the master of many disciples — through the whole of the Council exercised his influence with a skill and a boldness which would have made itself sensibly felt against any authority which was not Divine. We looked forward with anxiety to what might be his future career. I was fully prepared to hear that which I have heard; and I feared too that his eminent example might have led astray a multitude of his disciples. What do I see? Not a bishop, though many were his disciples. A few priests, and a handful of professors; and this is all that conies after the Council of the Vatican. A little momentary agitation, a little transient noise, and a passing sorrow. The Council has extinguished the last remaining divergence of thought in respect to faith, to be found among Catholics* It has compacted and consolidated the Divine authority of the Church in its head, and therefore in the whole body, both in the active and passive infallibility. The authority of the Vatican Council is fatal to* the semi-rationalism which had crept within the Church. The antagonists knew it well, and the Council knew it likewise when it made that definition. There never was a time when the faith of the Catholic Church was more firm, complete, and universal than at this time. And if in the course of ages a revolt of the intellect has carried away individuals from the Faith, in the course of the same ages, the manifestations of the Divine authority of the Church in the midst of mankind have been made more luminous and self-evident than ever.