Chapter 13. The Gift of Understanding

light and discernment of grace, whereby we perceive not only that which we are bound by the Commandments to do, but that which, if freely done, is more for the glory of God and more for our own sanctification. As, for instance, the Sermon on the Mount contains the whole code of perfection, and in that code there are a multitude of counsels to which we are not literally bound by the Ten Commandments; but any one who desires to be spiritually perfect must freely adopt those counsels as rules for his life. To give an example. Some persons have taken as the rule of their conduct that when they are in doubt whether of two things they shall do, they will always choose that which they believe to be more for the glory of God. They are not bound to do so, but they are prompted by the law of liberty, which is the law of the love of God and of our neighbor written upon our hearts, and making the will a law to itself.

Having thus finished this first part of the subject, which relates to the practical intellect, there remains only the second, which relates to the speculative intellect, and that again divides itself into two: namely, the gift of understanding and the gift of wisdom. I call it the gift of understanding, because the word " intellect," as it is in the text, would only lead to ambi^irity. We will therefore take the common English equivalent — namely, " understanding."

1. First of all, we have every one of us by nature the gift of intellect or understanding. But this natura intellect is not the gift of the Holy Ghost; it is a gift of the order of nature, not of the supernatural order of grace. Now the gift of intellect or of reason, which aU men have by nature, consists ji a certain f acuity in the uoul, like the eye in the body, by which we see, know, and undei-stand. The eye is so organized and adapted to the light that, when illuminated by the material light, we see; and the capacity and reach of the eye are developed by practice and by experience. We all know that sight in a child is not in its normal state until by experience it has acquired what we may call the habit of sight, by which it can combine, and judge, and measure the objects before it. So also the natural intellect has a power of perception or understanding, the limits of which we have never reached. We know there are limits, because the reason of man is not infinite; but the limits of the understanding within us have never yet been ascertained. It is developed more and more in proportion as its powers are called out, and when its powers are called into act they seem to be fixed. They do not again recede. Two men who have exactly the same natural powers will be so unequal, if the one be educated, and the other be uneducated, that they will geem to be almost of two different grades or of two different kinds of being. This natural intellect is in us all; and the men of science who believe nothing often manifest the development of this natural intellect in a very high degree of culture, subtlety, energy, and strength. But this is altogether distinct from the gift of intellect or understanding of which we have now to gpeak. This gift of intellect or understanding, as it is a gift of the Holy Ghost, is found in no man who is out of the grace of God; and therefore in no one who is an unbeliever in the revelation of God, and therefore ic no)ne who is out of charity with God and his neighbor

It is a special intellectual power¹ or perfection given to those who, corresponding to the light of faith and to the Spirit of God working within them, receive, over and above the light and the power of natural reason, a further supernatural gift, which becomes habitual like a special faculty. I cannot better explain what it is than by saying, that it is a supernatural habit or quality, or faculty abiding in the intellect, whereby it is elevated and enabled, h'rst, to understand supernatural truth with especial clearness; and next to penetrate into the reasons and the motives of faith; and, lastly, to exhibit and to prevail on others, by the exhibition of the truth, to believe in the same. It is therefore a discernment, like a subtile intuition of the eye, which penetrates with great precision below the surface and discerns that which lies beneath it. Intellects, we are told, is from intus legere the reading of that which is within the letter. When the eye reads the page of a book it reads that which is without; it reads the letters. But the intellect reads that which is within — the meaning of the letters, and oi their combinations, and of their suggestions. All this is unintelligible except to those who have an understanding of the deeper sense of what is read. Now this understanding of the full and inward sense, this perception of what lies beneath the letter, or, as we say, that which is to be read between the lines of a book — the knowledge of the substance and of the implicit sense — is that which we attain by tl is gift of understand-

THE GJFT OF UNDERSTANDING.

ing. 1 might give examples in this way. There is in the whole revelation of God a harmony, a proportion, an analogy of parts, which is not perceived except by those who have this special light and discernment. For the want of this perception, as we shall see hereafter many men with great intellectual power become skeptics. Things which a mere child would know, they do not know: things that a child would solve, to them are insoluble difficulties. Such, then, is the nature of this gift. 2. Now we will go on to see what are its operations. First, as we have seen, it enables us to understand with a special clearness the hidden meaning of the revelation of God. You will perhaps say, " But how can a man believe what he does not understand?" I have already said that the natural intellect is in all men, and the natural intellect must be uaed, it must be exerted to its utmost strength, ir examining the evidence upon which we believe. This is perfectly true. Reason is the preamble of faith. Unless a man were convinced by evidence that Christianity is a divine revelation, how could he believe it? Unless he believed upon evidence that Holy Scripture is the Word of God, how could he accept it? Unless he believed upon evidence that the Catholic Church is the only and true Church of Jesus Christ, how could he submit to it? It is quite true, then, that the natural intellect must go first, and must examine what may be called the preambles, before we can believe. After having examined the proper evidences, and after being intellectually convinced that they prove Christianity to be a divine revelation, and the Scriptures to be the Word of God, and the Catholic Church to be the Church of God, and the like — then we believe with a rational faith. There is no act more entirely intt and no act of the reason higher or more perf ect, than the believing in a Divine Teacher. It is an act of submission to the teaching of God. Therefore, do not let an}- • body imagine that faith is a blind act, or an act of superstitious credulity, or the act of those who cannot use their reason. It is in the highest sense a precise and perfect act of our intellectual power to submit our reason to a Divine Teacher; and having accepted the whole revelation on His authority, it is an intellectual act all the way along the path of faith to examine and to under stand what we believe. "We must know what it is, at least in outline, and we must know why we ought to believe it, before we can believe at all. Having first believed Christianity to be a divine revelation, then we begin to examine its details. But we no longer examine as in doubt whether to believe it or not; but in faith that we may understand more fully what we believe. We do not test its details as critics, to pronounce whether or no they are credible, whether or no they mean this or that, whether or no God could or could not have revealed such and such a thing, but we read the "Word of God as disciples, with the consciousness that we are in the presence of a Divine Teacher; that we have in our hands a document which is divine; and that though our faith is founded upon an intellectual conviction, it rises into a living and personal consciousness that we are related to a Divine Person, and that we can say what the Apostle said: " I know "Whom I have believed, and I am certain that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that day;"* I know, that * 2 Tim. i 12.

is, of Whom I am learning this truth, and I know that He will never mislead me, for He is Himself the mi-created Truth. u But having believed," Saint Anselm says, " as it would be contrary to the divine order for us to examine and to discuss by reasoning the revelation of God until we have believed it, so it would be an act of great negligence on our part if, after we have believed it, we did not try thoroughly to understand it," tho. oughly to penetrate under the surface, beneath the letter into the substance, into the analogies, and proportions, and relations of truth with truth.

Now the gift of intellect or understanding is precisely that gift of the Holy Spirit which enables us to understand the meaning of what we believe from the time when we believe it. We have here, therefore, a distinct description of its office. Let us take an example or two. We believe in the existence of God by natural light. We believe that God is one in three Persons by the light of revelation. A child knows so much as this from his Catechism; but those who have the gift of understanding will go on to contemplate in the Holy Trinity, so far as the human mind can understand divine things, what are the relations of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost; how They are three Persons, how They are co-equal, how They are co-eternal, how They differ only in that They are related to each other, and that all things in God are common save only the relations of Fatherhood, Sonship, and Procession. Therefore I may say, that the office of this gift of intellect is like that of a lens, by which we steadfastly look at any natural object until we see lines and features that are not visible to our ordinary sight. The naked eye cannot perceive them, but th« power of the microscope reveals them; and as the powers of the microscope are multiplied, we see more and learn more of the object, which still remains always the same to our natural sight. I might take for another example the Incarnation, and I hardly know any example more complete. The one phrase, u The Word was made flesh," contains the whole theology of the Incarnation in all its treatises. Compare that doctrine with the Nicene Creed, where it is said that the Son of God is God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, con substantial with the Father before all worlds. This is but an expansion of the words of Saint John. Take next the Creed of Saint Athanasius, in which the Incarnation is unfolded in precise terms — the two natures, the two substances, the one Person, the perfect humanity. Take next the third part of the Summa of Saint Thomas and the works of Petavius. Tins gradual unfolding of the simple utterance, " The Word was made flesh," is an example of the action of the gift of understanding analyzing and expanding the simple declaration of Saint John. The same might be shown in the doctrine of the most Holy Sacrament, of the Real Presence, of the mode of the Real Presence, and its many other truths.

Lastly, this gift of understanding has relation to the divine sovereignty and the divine operations in the world. I will put an example which, like the pillar in the wilderness, is all cloud and darkness to those whc have not this gift of understanding, and all light and clearness to those who have. If there be anything written in history, it is this: that the Chiuch has alwayi been persecuted and that the world has always been prosperous; and yet we are called upon to believe that God is the Sovereign over the world and over the Church. Nevertheless, we see faith always suffering, and we see unbelief always in prosperity. The men of this world taunt us with this. They are always •aying, " Look at those countries that have rejected the Catholic faith, how they thrive; look at their material progress in everything, their culture, their advancement, their solidity, their wealth, their commerce, their enterprise. Look at your Church. Why, the Head of it is shut up in his house; all the nations of the world are rejecting him one after another; they have ceased to believe in him; and you tell us this is the kingdom of God. Have you any difficulty in understanding this paradox? When the Divine Head oi the Church was upon earth was He not rejected; was He not isolated; did not men disbelieve in Him; was He not persecuted; was He not crucified? And is He not the King of kings, the Lord of lords, and has He not all power in heaven and in earth? The world which prospers for a day has its hour fixed, and ita doom is certain. The Psalmist, when he was perplexed with the prosperity of the ungodly, was cast down and wondered until he went into the. sanctuary of God, and then he understood the end of these men! It ia precisely the light of this gift of understanding which makes us to know at this moment that, despite of all successes, the warfare of the world against the Church can never prevail; that, despite of all reveises and defeats the Church must be more than conqueror Therefore, Pius IX. still sits upon the throne of Peter and Peter will reign unto the end. Whatever come* one thing cannot come. The world will never subdue to its will the Church of God.

The gift of understanding enables all who believe, and therefore, in an eminent degree, the doctors and teachers of the Church, to propagate and to defend the revelations of God. The Church has a threefold office. It is a witness of those things which in the beginning it saw and heard; secondly, it is a teacher of truth ia the sphere of intellect; and thirdly, an intellectual judge discerning between truth and falsehood. Its discernment is not only with the natural precision of the human reason, nor only by its natural lights, but also by its supernatural consciousness it discerns between faith and heresy. It is by the gift of understanding that we can solve the apparent difficulty of belief. To those who judge by the letter, or by outward facts, the sorrows and miseries of the world seem to obscure its witness to the goodness, if not to the existence, of God.

But how else shall we account for the existence of the world, or for the freedom of the will in man? In like manner, how are we to account for the Christian world? You see the natural world around us: you believe in its existence, and I know not how you can doubt of its Creator. So of the Christian world. You see in the midst of this natural world the rise and expansion of a Christian world. You cannot deny its existence, whether you believe it to be of divine foundation or not. But I do not know how an intellectual man or a consecutive reascner 3an believe that it had no founder; tor " every house is built by some man, but He that created all things is God."* Surely He that built thia Christian world must be something more than man. Saint Augustine said to the heretics of his day: " Securus judicat oMs terrarum" It is true that wo are surrounded by unbelievers, and by Jews, and by heathens, and by heretics, and by schismatics; but in the midst of all this confusion, the Church of God, sitting calm in its seat of truth and power, looks round about, and without care or fear is evidence of its own truth. As a tree still rests upon its root, though branches be broken from it by the wind, or by the lightning, or by man, so the Church stands no less firm and immovable in the midst of those who fall from it. All that once was part of itself lies dead under its shadow, but it remains living and unshaken as it was before.

Once more. Does it not stand to reason that error must vary from itself? Draw a thousand lines, curved or straight, with a pencil, and try to find any two of them that are identical. Walk a thousand paces, and then try to return upon your footsteps. Do you think that you could plant your foot a thousand times in the same place? Put it to the test. You will find that there is but one thing which in all places is identical. The truth never varies, errs, or changes. Wherever the truth is, it is the same. The Divine mind never varies. The mind of man divinely guided is everywhere the same. But the actions of the unaided human mind are inconstant and variable; in every mind they are diverse, in every time they diverge, in every place they put off their identity. There is the variation * Heb. iii. 1 of infirmity, of forgetfulness, of inadverteLce, of wilful innovation, of vain-glorious singularity, of proud conceit. Error detects itself by its multiplicity. Look, then, at the Catholic Church, and look at all the forms of fragmentary Christianity that surround it. Which is truth and which is error \ The gift of understanding can read beneath the complex pretensions of error the simplicity and certainty of the only truth.

We will take one more example. Truth comes from Him Who knows what is in man, from Him Who bears in His hand the key of the human intellect and of the human heart. The truth of God in Jesus Christ is so precisely fitted to the heart and intellect of man, that it alone can move through the wards. Therefore, it is alone the true key. Find, if you can, any other religion or any fragmentary form of Christianity which can accomplish this. We see every day that those who try their mutilated religion upon the human intellect and the human heart break the wards and hamper the lock. There is but one key, and that is the key of David, which for these eighteen hundred years has opened, and no man could shut, and has shut, and no man could open, the kingdom of God in the soul. We must choose between one of two things: we must either believe the Catholic faith, or find a rational and intellectual solution of the unity of truth, and of its adaptation to human nature and of the existence of the Christian world.

3. A third office of this gift is to reduce the revelation of truth to the form of a science. We hear much of science in these days. We hear of physical, and social, and historical science; but as soon as any man says that theology is a science, at once we see the supercilious change and lines of countenance, which we all well know, in those who have courtesy at least to keep silence. Let us ask what, after all, is science? Science means the knowledge we have of truth by resolving it into its first principles, which again are self-evident Now I fully admit that theology is not a science in that strict sense; because revelation, which is the matter of theology, is to be resolved into the authority of God. Therefore it is not self-evident to the human reason; but for that cause I altogether deny that history, and a great deal of that which we are called upon to receive as science, is science, or even scientific. I fully admit that mathematics, arithmetic, geometry, are sciences; and I would add, the sciences of the physical world. They may be tested by experiment, they may be resolved into self evident principles; therefore they may be called science. And I will also use the word science of theology, for this reason: that whatever is methodical, cle ir, • e inite, precise, whatever can be stated in its principles, may be called scientific, if not in the strictness of propriety, at least next to it; and in that sense it is quite true that the revelation of faith is a supernatural science. For instance, there is nothing which is so definite in its conceptions, in its terms, in its definitions, as the Catholic faith. I have already given one example. Take the theology of the Nature, and of the Persons, and of the Perfections of God. Can anything be more precise? Its precision is turned to our reproach. Take again the Athanasian Creed; take the definitions by which we express every doctrine 3i the faith. I need riot prove that these tilings are definite. The world cries out- against ns for that very definiteness; the world denounces us because we are dogmatic. If we are not dogmatic, who would know what we teach? If our doctrines had neither beginning nor ending, nor circumference, like the opinions that are tossed to and fro by conflicting sects, nobody would know what we mean. The admission of one indefinite word into an argument, like the admission of one false figure into a sum, confuses the whole; and therefore the Church from the beginning has been most rigorously precise in the choice of the very words by which it conveys the faith. Having defined its doctrines, it assembles them and groups them together. Your baptismal Creed is the germ of a whole science. The twelve articles of the Apostles' Creed are, in fact, the text of the whole theology which the Councils of the Church have elaborated in every age to this day, perpetually analyzing more and more exactly the meaning of every revealed truth by this gift of understanding, and then combining them all together into perfect unity arid symmetry, and yet never venturing to draw a line round it, or to say this contains the whole of the meaning; and that because in this life " we know in part, and we prophesy in part," while we are waiting for that time when the perfect shall come, and what is partial shall be done away. We do not venture now to declare that we possess the whole truth of any mystery, but only so far as it is revealed. If you look from a high mountain, you will see a multitude of paths and roads and rivers diverging every way. At last they.reach the horizon and vanish. So it is with the truths of revelation. We can trace them so far ai they are revealed to us, but at last they reach the vanishing points, where they pass into the infinite mind of God; there we cannot follow them. Theology does not venture to give account of anything beyond that which has been revealed; but that which has been revealed, theology, with a precise treatment and exact method, defines: and combining truths together, it brings out that which is implicitly revealed. Theology surrounds the faith, like the radiance round the sun. The science of God radiates from the baptismal Creed. This, then, is another operation of the gift of intellect. 4-. We may now come to a further office of this gift. When theology comes in contact, and it may be in conflict, with the sciences of the world, it is the office of the Church to harmonize the science of revealed truth with the sciences of the human intellect. We are told that it cannot be harmonized with physical sciences, and the stock example which is always given us is this: that Galileo was condemned for teaching the motion of the earth. It is true, indeed, that a book of Galileo was examined at a time when the whole world believed in the motion of the sun, and when the motion of the earth was not as yet a scientific truth. It had not been yet established by science; nor was it scientifically proved for one hundred years afterwards. For a century after Gali-leo some of the highest intellects still believed in the motion of the sun. Many in this country lived and died disbelieving the hypothesis of Galileo, and believing it to be contrary to Scripture. Therefore the Church, at a time when the doctrine was but a hypothesis and a conjecture, apparently running counter to the belief of mankind, and to what seemed to be the words of Scrip* tu re. discountenanced a book winch te/ided to unsettle the belief of men both in natural and supernatural truth. The Church defined nothing, and uttered no doctrine. It made a disciplinary prohibition to protect men from the disturbing effect of an unproved hypothesis. And what has been the course of the Church since then? From the moment that the motion of the earth was established as a scientific truth the Church has accepted it; and why? Because the Church has no revelation of physical science. No revelation whatever is made of astronomy. The Book of Joshua uses the language of sense, and not the language of science, in saying that the sun stood still. Therefore faith and theology are in no way implicated, and in no way in conflict. They who accuse the Church betray only the animus to throw stones which fall on their own heads.

Once more. We are told by men of science that tho chronology of the Church is false; that the age of the world, instead of 6,000 years, is at least 40,000 or 50,000, and I do not know how many more. On what ground do they tell us this? Because they say that the accumulation of alluvial matter at the mouths of great rivers could not be deposited within a less period of time. They say, too, that they have found bones of I do not know what animals in strata which would require foi their formation at least 40,000 years. My answer is this: Have you had a letter from heaven to tell you? What you call facts you make and unmake, and make BO often over again, that we never know where to find you. They are to us nebulae, or gaseous vapors, without fixity or permanent form. You serve them up ta us like new articles of science, and we recognize the old stamp and the old worn-out brass and copper of exploded systems. Till you agree among yourselves upon some permanent facts, we must say: You know little about it. We have positive proof that the deposits of rivers vary according to many conditions, such as the fall of rain, the volume of the flood, the speed of the currents, the beds of rivers. In a few years waters have beer* seen to accumulate, or to sweep away, masses equal to any of these for the deposit of which the chronological tables of our modern philosophy would assign a thousand. Again, they tell us that geology is inconsistent with the doctrine of the creation of the world. Why? Were they there to see? On what do they found this assertion? How can they account for the existence of. the world over which they would establish their intellectual lordship? This physical world was either eternal, or it was created, or it made itself. This last no sane man will say. The first is to deify both matter and decay. Nothing remains but to believe that it had a beginning, and therefore a cause; but if it was caused it was created. I do not know what your intellect may say to this, but mine absolutely refuses to accept any other supposition. I should violate not only the gift of understanding, but my natural reason, if I were to say that the world was without a cause, or that it caused itself. When, then, we are told that geology has shaken tho foundations of revelation, I say, Not yet. In those who already did not believe, in those who use such language as a plea for unbelief, I can understand it; but that any man who ever had the light)f faith could be shaken by such pretended and periodically-shifting facts, I can hardly imagine. Such a man would not onl) lose his faith, but abdicate his reason. Then we are told: " If you say that man was descended from a single pair, how can you account for the multitude of nations? " Well, the more we search out the origin of mankind, the more clearly we find that the multiplicity of races may be traced up into four great families, and these four again into twc; and that those two great families part on either side of one tract of region, pointing ta an unity of origin. As science advances it does not shake, but confirms, revelation. Then they ask, u How can you account for the multiplicity of tongues, dialects, and languages?" In like manner, the further we have analyzed languages the more we find them to run up into dialects, and dialects to put off their peculiarities, and put on the likeness of an original speech. They gradually ascend upwards, like the races themselves, pointing to one fountain from which language came in the beginning. I do not here pretend to state these subjects adequately. I give them only as examples of the action of the gift of understanding. It is thus that the Church is adjusting, and harmonizing with all that survives of true science the revelation committed to its custody.

I will take one more example. We hear a great deal of progress, intellectual advances, men of culture, and the like. Now, I will ask, Has all the advancement of civilization in ethics, in politics, and in social culture refuted, or superseded, or changed the bounds of one revealed truth? Does not Christianity remain at this moment imperishable and immutable? It is constituted of these three aboriginal elements: namely, the purest and most perfect conception of God that man ever knew; the purest and most perfect conception of man, revealed in the Incarnation, that the world ever saw; the purest and ir.ost perfect morality — that is, the relations between God and man, and between man and man. I ask whether Christianity, which contains these three great and constructive elements, has in any sense been set aside or shaken by the intellectual, or moral, or political, or social progress of mankind? Has it elevated or corrected the Christian conception of God, or of man, or of morals? Now, I will affirm that it has done no such thing. Like as the ark floated on the waters; the deeper they became, the higher it rose, so does Christianity at this moment repose in all calmness and majesty on the great flood of human science in its highest cultivation.

5. My only other point is this: that the Church, by the gift of understanding, ascertains and demonstrates the perfect unity of science. " Deus sdentiarum Tu es" The Christian conception of the Divine Nature is an infinite Intelligence — the Fountain of all Sciences. There is but one Uncaused, one Infinite, and one Eternal; one Being Who is above all beings; and to the Uncreated all created being is subordinate. It stands related to Him in an order of which He is the only Head. There is a Hierarchy of Being, and God is the Lord of all; and this Hierarchy of Being is also a Hierarchy of Intelligence. All created intelligences are subordinate to the one uncreated intelligence of God. 80 also all sciences are related to the one science of God, from Whom all descend and to Whom all return; and in that hierarchy of sciences, theology, or the science of God, is the first and the Queen. All other sciences, physical and human — that is, relating to the world and to man — are subordinate, but inseparably united, be cause in God all truth is one. In the Divine mind all truths are in harmonious unity; all divergences, as we think them, are but apparent. We see only in part Only a portion of the infinite mind of God is revealed to us. "We have a part of an eternal writing unrolled; the rest unrevealed. We cannot read the context. We Bee a part of the great chart or map of truth, in which we can only follow certain tracks and paths. A section of a diagram is before us, the complement of which we do not know; but when in the light of the kingdom of God we shall see even as we are seen, then the perfect unity of that intellectual light will be visible. Every eye shall see it; every intelligence shall be full. The white light of the day contains all prismatic colors, which, when separated by human skill and made visible to the eye, seem to differ one from another; but when once more they are all resolved again into the perfect unity of the solar light, all differences are lost in an un - divided splendor. So with the sciences of the world-So far as they are erroneous they will be hereafter cast out; so far as they are true they will all be taken up into thtt one infallible and uncreated light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.

Such then, dear brethren, is the action of this gift of intellect. Time would fail me if I were to attempt to point out what is its effect in forming the teachers of the Church. This I must pass over; but I cannot pass over one last truth. You are well aware that the Sovereign Pontiff, Pius IX., has over and over again, in letters without number, in the Encyclical, and the Syllabus issued in the year 1864, condemned in the most express and peremptory terms the separation of philosophy and science from revelation, and has enjoined upon all men of science and all teachers of philosophy to cultivate both in union with, and in subordination to, that one divine science, the revelation of faith. The world has risen in uproar against this supreme voice. The men of science have everywhere clamored against it as an attempt to bring them into intellectual subjection. Professors of Germany rose up and appealed to Caesar. The persecution of the Church which we see at this moment in Germany is nothing more than a revenge of the mortified pride of the men of culture and of the philosophers who are deposed from their seats of error by the Vatican Council. They were one by one put down. They were suspended by their bishops, and finally, because they would not obey, were put out; and being put out, they gathered themselves together to make head against the Church of God. But their end is sure. They will be scattered from before its face, as all heretics have ever been. The Holy See has always laid down this great and vital principle — namely, that seen lar and religions instruction shall never be parted in education. It has laid down this principle not only foi the schools of the poor, but for the universities of the rich. It has never wavered: it has never receded, and it never will; and that because education is not the mere teaching of intellectual opinions. Education is the formation of the whole man — intellect, heart, will, character, mind, and soul. Whether it be the poor child in the parish school, or the SOL }f the rich man in the university, it is all the same. The Catholic Church will accept as education nothing less than the formation of the whole man. Therefore, when doctors and politicians talk of the separation of the religious and the secular element, the Church will have none of it, and that for this plain reason — instruction is not education. Secular teaching, without the light of faith and the gifts of the Holy Ghost, not only cannot form the man, "but they deform the man. They form the man upon a false model; they unshape him from that original reflection of the image of God which is in him. First, they deprive him of light; and where light departs, darkness comes. The human mind, once deprived of the light of revelation, is filled with the clouds of unbelief or of credulity. It can give no account of God; it has no knowledge of His character or of its own nature. Is this education? Though a man were a professor of seven sciences, without the knowledge of God and of himself what is he? In the sight of God he is like the men of the old world which knew not God. He may be as wise as Empedocles or Aristotle, but he is not a Christian. He is not formed upon the type of Christianity: he is not after the example of Jesus Christ.

Lastly, where the mind is deprived of light it is perverted. The whole intellectual and moral nature loses its normal shape. It is perpetually conceiving and giving out erroneous judgments, erroneous principles, erroneous maxims, which issue in erroneous and dangerous actions. The separation of religious from secular education wrecks altogether the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost in the souls of those who have been baptized. Ts it a wonder, then, that the Catholic Church will never consent that its children shall be reared without the knowledge of their faith, cr that educatirn shall be so parted asunder that secular knowledge shall be made the subject of daily and earnest inculcation, and that religion should be left out as an accident, to be picked np when and as it may?

Finally, you ah1 have this gift of understanding, if you are in a state of grace. Pray therefore every day, in the words of the Apostle, that you may "be filled with the knowledge of His will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding." Lay to heart two passages of Holy Scripture, for they are the words of the Holy Ghost: " God, Who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, and given the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. If our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost; in whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them that believe not, lest the light of the glorious Gospel of God should shine unto them."² And: " For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, that He would grant you according to the riches of His glory to be strengthened by His Spirit in the inward man;.... that being rooted and founded in charity, you may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth, and length, and height, and depth, to know the charity of Christ, which surpasseth all knowledge, that you may be filled unto all the fullness of God." f

Footnotes

1. " Intellectus est habitus supernaturalis, non concreatus natural* iter omnibus sed simul cum charitate et gratia menti infosua per quern prima principia Chriatianse sapientise cognoscuntur." Carthusian Opp. min. torn. i. tract, ii. art. 21. ↩

2. 2 Cor. ii 4-6. f Ephes, iii. 14-19. ↩