III. On the Subjects Proper to the Academia

The office of addressing you to-day at the opening of the third year of the Academia, through a cause which we all deeply regret and earnestly hope may soon pass away, has fallen unexpectedly to me. And though I could wish it in other hands, above all in his who but for illness would have addressed you, I will do as best • I can.

When the other day I heard the Congress of Malines recommend the establishment of Academias such as this, as one of the most efficacious means of counter acting the false and anti-Catholic principles abroad at this day, it was not without a lively satisfaction that I remembered that we in England, who are but in the rudiments of our Catholic organisation, have nevertheless for two years had our Academia of the Catholic religion. And on reviewing the subjects which have been treated by its members, we may congratulate ourselves, not only on the excellence of many of the discourses addressed to us, considered in themselves, but also on the timeliness and applicability of those discourses in relation to the errors of the days and of the country in which we live. And this leads me to offer a few remarks, not on any specific thesis, hut, as the custom is in Rome at the opening of each year, on an argomento libcro—& wider and freer subject. I will therefore speak of the nature and intention of the Academia and of the suhjects proper for its sessions. Its main intention, as you arc well aware, is to exhihit the truths and principles of the Catholic faith and Church, not only in themselves, hut in their relations to the world and to the age, to philosophy, to science, and to politics; and that not too only absolute, hut especially in the bearing of these truths and principles upon the errors of the time. The Academia in Rome was instituted, as you well know, in the beginning of this century, to combat the Voltairian infidelity and the anti-Catholic revolution, which from France began at that time to descend upon Italy. It is therefore what • the Germans would call the timc^nrit that we have to appreciate, and, so far as it is hostile to truth, to combat and, by God's help, to counteract.

With a view to such an appreciation, and to mark out in some degree the subjects proper to be treated, I would ask leave to make a few remarks upon the times in which we live.

It is, I know, a common illusion to imagine that our days are exceptional for good or for evil, and that they surpass in importance the times of our fathers. A slight event before our eyes is more vivid, real, and exciting than the great actions of past history. It needs a calm judgment, and a wide comparative survey of the events both of the past and of the present, not to be carried away by this illusion. Shall 1 seem to incur, this censure, if I say that the times in which we live are exceptionally great, and pregnant beyond most other times gone by with certain mature consequences of past events? Let me, then, endeavour to shelter myself from this fault and from the recoil of my own censure. It would seem to me that the age in which we live, that is the lifetime of our contemporaries, is marked by a crisis of exceptional magnitude and importance.

1. And first, the Protestant Reformation has reached its three hundredth year. It has run the career which is usually permitted to a heresy. Pelagianism and its reUquifC infested Africa, Gaul, and Britain for less than three hundred years. Donatism ran out in three hundred years. Arianism and its offsets possessed first the political power of the Lower Empire, then the Gothic races, then Lombardy and Spain for about three hundred years. Where is Pelagianism? where is Donatism? and where is Arianism? S. Gregory the Great lived when Arianism was dying out. His pontificate inaugurated the begin ning of a new period of Catholic faith and unity. In our day Protestantism has reached its term. As a religion it may be said hardly to exist, for its transformations are such, that the forms of fragmentary Christianity which pass under its name would be dis owned by the Protestant Reformers. It has ceased to be a definite and intelligible form of spiritual conviction or of intellectual thought. It exists as a form of politics, as a plea for social hostility to the Catholic religion, and for revolutionary diplomacy against the

Catholic Church. It is a fact pointed out by Lord Macaulay in his earlier years, when as yet the asperity of the partisan had not soured and warped the candour of the historian, that in every instance Protestantism was established by the civil power; that when the civil power ceased to propagate it, Protestantism ceased to spread; that there is no example of a country becoming Protestant since the first outbreak of the sixteenth century; that there are Protestant countries which have become Catholic again, but no Catholic country which has become Protestant; that whatsoever in the confusions of the last three hundred years has been lost to Catholicism has been lost to Christianity; that whatso ever has been gained to Christianity has been gained to Catholicism.1

Now, as a form of religion or of intellectual thought, it is certain.that Protestantism has not been able to perpetuate, much less to propagate, itself. In Germany it has passed off into partial or into complete Neology; in Switzerland and France, extensively into Socinianism; in England into a congeries of irreconcilable heterodoxies, which are in a perpetual flux.

Perhaps, in Scotland the original Protestantism re tains its character with greater tenacity, partly from the persistent spirit of the Scottish religionists, and partly from its isolation and remoteness from the Catholic nations which by contact powerfully affect other Protestant countries. It is certain, nevertheless, that both speculative unbelief and practical infidelity have made great ravages in Scotland. My object, how- > Essay on Ranke's History of the Popes, vol. iii. p. 253.

ever, is not to enter into farther detail than is necessary for the justification of the assertion which I have made, that is, that Protestantism as a religion is dead. It has departed from its own type. It has generated a multitude of new and erroneous religions, and in them it has lost its identity, and therefore as a religion its existence. What number of professing Christians at this day are intellectually represented by the Helvetic Confession, the Augsburg Confession, the Westminster Catechism, and the Thirty-nine Articles? These things are now what the Thalia of Arms, or the creeds of Sirmium, Ancyra, and Seleucia were in the times of S. Gregory the Great.

But I must narrow the ground of our subject, and confine myself to England, alone with which we have chiefly to do.

There are, then, certain signs upon the Established Protestantism of England which mark its advanced decay.

First, its singular isolation. It is out of the unity of the Catholic Church, and therefore of the great Christian society of the world. It is rejected by the Greek Church, with which it endeavours in vain to hold communion. It has no union with the Protestant Churches of Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, or France. It is repudiated by the Established Church of Scotland. It is abandoned or rejected by 58 per cent of the population of England. Of the remaining 42 per cent much continues in it by mere nominal, traditional, social, political adhesion. Anglican Protestantism is not only struck with sterility in propacation, but with an incapacity to retain even its own hereditary members. It is remarkable that this is the state of the Establishment, after an unprecedent, stir and exertion, in which it must bo said that great natural energy and generosity has been manifested during a quarter of a century. But it is evident to all who stand upon the shore, that nothing can save the Established Protestant or Anglican religion from sinking. Its seams are gaping wide, and the waters of dissension, indifference, and rationalism must inevitably draw it under.

Now this, though it be no new fact, is more advanced and more evident than it was thirty years ago. Until then the Anglican Establishment was girded and under pinned by its exclusive social and political privileges. Three hundred years of regal supremacy and legal primacy and religious monopoly had given to it an apparent and fictitious superiority.

The repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts and the Catholic Emancipation threw the Anglican Establishment upon its own centre for support. It could no longer rest npon the legal repression of those who dis believed or rejected its claims. It had to go alone, to depend upon its own spiritual and intellectual resources. With what result the last thirty years will show. It is true that what is called freedom of action has brought forth much zeal from its members; but it has also brought out their antagonisms; if it has multiplied its churches and its ministers, it has multiplied its con tentions and its divisions. For three hundred years its bond of coherence was mechanical and external, not internal and dynamical. It was not the unity of thought and will, because it had neither unity of faith, nor even the principle of Divine faith for its centre. When the outward bonds which swathed it were taken off, it began to separate every way. All its internal repulsions began -to exhibit themselves in a more developed activity, and to reach a farther point of divergence; for instance, the two schools which are now dominant in their activity are the Eatioualistic and what I must call the Romanising. They are drawing to themselves the vigour, zeal, generosity, and earnestness of the Establishment, and in their vehement de parture from each other they are rending the Establishment asunder. And yet thirty years ago these two schools existed only in germ. They who moved the University of Oxford with such a vehemence of alarm to condemn Dr. Hampden's Bampton Lectures never dreamed that in that very place in a few years Professor Powell would deny the whole supernatural order, and explicit Rationalists would be tutors and heads of houses. They, too, who contended for Tract 90, as if for the body of Patroclus, never dreamed that Anglican clergymen would now be not only burning incense, or writing tracts about Low Masses, but would be forming sisterhoods and professing to believe the infallibility of the Church.

These things, which are thought to be signs of life, are rather signs of the acute excitement which precedes dissolution. They are like the mental over-activity of men dying of consumption. They rise fitfully above themselves, and then sink by exhaustion. That

Anglican Protestantism will ever become one in mind, or Opinion, or doctrine, is intrinsically impossible. The law of internal divergence which distracts it, is irresistible and multiplying in its force, and its intellectual antagonisms are becoming every ten years more and more intensely developed. That any one form of thought should prevail over all the others and cast them out is equally impossible. That the Roman-ising school should ever prevail, no Catholic who knows what an act of Divine faith is can for a moment imagine; nor any one who knows how deep and violent is the hostility of the English laity towards these fanciful imitations of the Popery which they hate.

I cannot fail here to notice, in passing, an error which unhappily has found among Catholics a few to countenance it. I mean the notion that the duty of Anglicans is to remain where they are with a view to spreading their opinions in the Established Church: in other words, that individuals may postpone, or even refuse, to submit to the Church in the hope of bring ing about what I may call a corporate union of the Churches. Such a theory, to make the best excuse I can for any Catholic who holds it, must rest upon the erroneous assumption that the Anglican Establishment is as truly a Church as the schismatical Greek Church, that it possesses valid orders, succession, sacraments, jurisdiction to absolve, and truth of doctrine, i.e. the principle of Divine faith. How any Catholic can hold this view without unsoundness, I do not sec. If all the pretensions of the Establishment were as undoubted as the orders and sacraments of the Greek Church, still no

Catholic could maintain such a theory. Every several Greek is bound to submit to the Catholic Church, one by one, without question or thought as to what others may or may not do. Salvation is the first law of conscience, and to hasten out of a state of even material schism or material heresy is an absolute duty. To remain in it sciens et prudens would make the heresy or the schism to be formal. If any one wish to see an example of the error I allude to, let him look at a journal called the Union Review; a singular example of arrogant and pharisaical patronising of Catholics and the Catholic Church, with much petty and malevolent gossip, picked up it is to be feared in Catholic houses, and from Catholics who lend the countenance of their sympathy and, I fear, of their name to this mischievous delusion. But to return. It has always appeared to me that this intellectual movement towards the Catholic Church was providentially intended to restore the line of- continuity between the intelligence of the English people and the intelligence of the universal Church. The Reformation had utterly dissolved it, and the breach was kept open by every means, as by change of language and of terminology, and even change of pronunciation in both Latin and Greek, whereby we have become 'barbarians' to all nations, and all nations 'barbarians unto us.' England was so cut out from the faith, the language, the spiritual and intellectual context and communion of the Catholic world, that it ceased to receive from abroad the influences of other races, or to make itself understood by them. Nothing but this can explain the strange ignorance of the

English respecting the Catholic Church and faith I do not mean only among the poor-who m a part England known to me, call their Catholic neighbours Romans, believing them to he the posterity of Julius Ctesar-but among educated and cultivated men. solution of continuity between the English intelligence and the Catholic intelligence brings with it also a separation and variance of all the sympathies and instincts which spring from unity of intellectual juc ment and belief. Now nothing, humanly speak,g, could have restored this continuity except a 1 minds advancing like skirmishers towards the Catholi. Church, or like a pontoon bridge gradually thrown across the gulf which the Reformation opened. It also to be noted that almost at the same moment there sprang up in the Presbyterian Establishment a movement on which the name of Irving has been fixed. This movement has developed into a servile imitate of Catholic doctrine and worship, together with I most fanatical enmity against the Catholic Church. These two parallel movements are not permitted wit. out design, nor will they fail to bear their fruits.

One consequence is already seen. The Catholu doctrines and practices, which, twenty years ago, wer defended controversially by our preachers and writ are now for the most part adopted, preached,, defended by a numerous body among our oppon They are in mutiny, and have fallen into contention among themselves about our Catholic theology, may save the time which controversy wastes, and, instead of going out into the battle-field, we may go into the harvest-field to reap and to bind, and to gather our sheaves into the garner.

This, then, is one point in which our times are more critical than those' of our fathers.

Another remarkable and unprecedented sign of decay upon Anglican Protestantism is the fact that the young men of cultivation and vigour of mind are turning away from its ministry. It is not enough to say that worldly callings present easier and higher prizes, and that the poverty of the clergy repels young men from ordination. This is not true of the Catholic Church, and that too in our great poverty. The Catholic priests in England certainly do not receive on an average the wages of upper servants. But the sons of our best families, and the highest and best for intellect and cultivation among their sons, give themselves joyously, but humbly and with fear of their own unworthiness, to the priesthood of the Church. It is not poverty which causes this repugnance to Anglican orders. It is the doubt, the un certainty, and the bondage of an incoherent and untenable position which repels them. On the other hand, it is the living consciousness of the apostolic power and jurisdiction, the certainty and freedom of Divine faith, which draws our youth to the narrow and self-denying path of a priest's life.

The true cause, then, of this ominous desertion of the young men is to be found in their unwillingness to bind themselves by subscription to incoherent and untenable formularies. There have been, indeed, attempts made at other times to abolish subscription to the Articles; but with this difference. In 1688, it was a movement in order to comprehend nonconformists; in 1774, it was a feeble attempt got up by a few Socinianising clergy men But now it is far more widely demanded. The Rationalistic school, as a body, and the Romanising school, as a body, desire to be free from the Articles. The laity are forward in asking that their pastors i enjoy the same liberty as themselves. No layman holds himself in any way bound by the Thirty-nine Articles. He rejoices in the liberty of thinking and criticising, believing and disbelieving, as he likes. And he asks the same liberty for his teachers.

In proof of this I will quote an authority which must carry no little weight. Professor Stanley, in a letter to

Dr. Tait, says:

• The intelligent, thoughtful, highly-educated you men who twenty or thirty years ago were to be found in every ordination, are gradually withheld from the service of the Church, and from the profession to which their tastes, their characters, and their gifts best fit them. For this great calamity, the greatest that threatens the permanence and the usefulness of theChurch of Engl there are, no doubt, many causes at work-some transitory, some beyond the power of any legislative enac ment to reach. But there can be no question that one cause is the reluctance, the increasing reluctance of young men of the kind just described to entangle themselves in obligations with which they cannot heartily gyrapathise, and which may hereafter be brought against them to the ruin of their peace and of their profess usefulness.¹

Again he adds: 'I have been told on good authority that of nineteen young men, within the acquaintance of a single individual, who were within the last few years known to have gone to Cambridge with the intention of becoming clergymen, every one has since relinquished his intention, chiefly on the ground of the present state of subscription. Similar statistics to a larger extent, although of a less definite form, might be produced at Oxford.'3

This, again, is a new sign of these times, and one which is full of consequences. It has been well said that the opinions of the young men are a prophecy of the future. And certainly a system from which the young men turn away has the sentence of death in itself.

Finally, the rationalism which lay hid in the Anglican Keformation has at last reached its legitimate development. After rejecting the Divine authority of the Church, the tradition of dogma, the Catholic interpretation of Holy Scripture, it is ending by a denial of the inspiration and authenticity of the sacred books. I notice this, not to dwell upon it, but because it is the most signal evidence of the failure of Anglicanism. Its 'Articulus stantis aut cadentis Ecclesire' is the sixth Article, which affirms the sufficiency of Scripture, and rests its authenticity and canonicity upon the testimony of the Church. It is precisely here that the last blow has been struck at the Anglican system; and the tion in the Church of England and in the University of Oxford Bv Arthur P. Stanley, D.D. 3 Ibid, note, p. 31.

rationalistic infidelity which has robbed Protestant Germany of its belief in Holy Scripture is beginning to gather and to descend from high places upon England. The Sixth Article has been tried and found wanting; and Anglicanism, which has based itself upon the Scriptures, has generated a spirit of unbelief which has undermined the Scriptures on which it professed to rest. Whatsoever may tend to the exposure and ex tinction of error must be a cause of thankfulness to Catholics; and yet we cannot but view with sorrow and with alarm the gradual decay and dying out of the fragmentary truths of Christianity which' survived the Keformation. A belief in the revelation of Christianity and in the inspiration of the Holy Scriptures may be said to have been universal in England. But it is this which is now giving way in the educated classes and in the masses of the English people.

I might add many more reasons for the belief that Protestantism in general, and Anglicanism in particular, has reached the term of its pretensions, and that we are at the crisis of its decline, but time forbids.

•2. Another reason for regarding these times as critical and of singular importance is the condition of the Catholic Church both in the East and in the West. In the East there is a disposition among the populations separated from it to return to its unity, of which movement Ptussia may be considered as the centre; in the West a similar movement is in progress, of which England is visibly the centre. The missionaries of the Chnrch are penetrating the East with a vigour and success never known since the missions of S. Francis

Xavier; and the Church in the West is renewing its strength and its action upon the old Catholic countries of Europe with an energy never seen since the Council of Trent.. Neither is it without a significance that the other day the tercentenary of that great council was solemnly celebrated in the presence of a prince of the Church, delegated from the Holy See, in the ancient city of Trent. For three hundred years its decrees de Reformatione have been working deeply and surely in the universal Church. The civil powers have distracted its operations by their jealous maintenance of old abuses of prerogatives and customs; but revolutions have come as the scourges of God to sweep them clean away. After these reigns of terror the Church has renewed itself in a purity, majesty, and expansion exceeding all its past. Witness the Church in France, the Church in Holland, and now the Church in Ireland and the Church in England. After three hundred years of penal laws, to which the fabulous cruelties of the Spanish Inquisition are merciful, the Church in England is once more free. I shall not touch even in outline the well-known events of the last thirty years — the Emancipation, the Hierarchy, the expansion of the Catholic Church in England. These three words are enough to show that our days are exceptional: that we are witnesses of one of those miracles of grace, of those resurrections of the Church after generations of death, by which God manifests His presence and His sovereignty. But it is a wonderful and almost articulate Providence that the same event which liberated the

Catholic Church to use the freedom of its power should have driven the Anglican Estahlishment upon the infirmities of its own internal incoherence; that when the State ceased to persecute the Church and to protect the Estahlishment Protestantism should have begun to dissolve and Catholicism to expand itself; nothing has held the Church under for three hundred years but the whole weight of a penal code; and nothing has held the P^stahlishment up hut the favour and force of the civil power.

Divine Providence has seemed to watch its oppor tunities to exhibit the office and action of the Church by diametrical contrasts. When the Royal Supremacy becomes visibly intolerable in its pretensions, the Supremacy of Rome enters in its calmness and power. When an article of the Apostles' Creed disappears from the religion of the Anglicans, the definition of the Immaculate Conception is promulgated; while the Established religion is visibly losing its social and political influence in England, the revolutions of Europe in iifteen years of sedition, intrigue, and warfare cannot overthrow the temporal power of the Vicar of Jesus Christ; when the Protestants of Germany and England by the aid of their pastors are denying the inspiration of Holy Scripture and undermining the authenticity of its books, the Catholic Church, the mother of un written traditions, against whom they have been perpetually clamoring, stands sole as the pillar and ground of the Truth, the witness and keeper of Holy Writ. ' Hacc non sine numine.' They are like the chips of wood which under the childish hands of Hildebrand, manum pueri dactante numine, fell into legible forms and prophesied of the future.

It was, then, in such a time as this that the Academia of the Catholic religion was founded in London. Its object; as we know, was to form a centre to which Catholics, both priests and laymen, who desire to serve the Truth and the Church may be drawn: as a means of communication and correspondence: and as a mutual help for the study and solution of questions which affect the Catholic religion, that is both the Faith and the Church, and that both in speculation and in practice. And, first, we have to be thankful for its existence and for its continuance, and for the discourses which have been addressed to us, especially for some of them. Nevertheless, we have not as yet recognised as much as we may the direct and practical uses for which it may be employed. And with a view to this I would endeavour to suggest the subjects which appear to be proper to this Academia.

They may, I think, be stated as follows: 1. First, all such arguments as exhibit the relation of reason to Kevelation, of reason to the Church, of the Church to the Scriptures, of reason to the Scriptures. These subjects are especially forced upon us by the intellectual condition of England, by the dissolution of Protestantism, and by the influence of these two causes upon many among our own people. It is much to be desired that certain men would subdivide these sub jects among themselves, and engage to produce papers upon each of them, to be read before the Academia.

From such, a volume most useful and needful at this moment might easily be formed. We must all desire that the Catholic Church should be seen by all men to stand foremost in the defence of the Word of God, un written and written, in these days of unbelief.

2. Next, the relation of the Church to politics requires;i new and careful restatement. The great Catholic writers, such as S. Thomas, Suarez, and Bellarmine, treated of these subjects in the abstract, and in their bearing upon the forms of political society known in their day. But the last centuries have changed the whole aspect and application of their principles. The political society of the last three hundred years is a new phase of Christian civilisation. The inevitable divorce of the ecclesiastical and civil powers, which is every where accomplishing, and the separation of the nations, as such, from the unity of the faith, which brings with it the desecration of the corporate life and action of society — that is, of the civil power — is a new and un precedented fact of a portentous character, charged with a future which we can only contemplate with submission to the will of God and confidence in His care of His Church and people. A multitude of subjects are at once forced upon us. What is the relation of the Church to the civil society of the world? Has it any duty towards it, or direction over it? Do politics enter into morals, and has the Church any jurisdiction within the sphere of politics? Can politics be separated from the faith, and Christian society from the Church? Is civilisation dependent on or independent of Christianity, and therefore of the Church? Was the concurrent action of the spiritual and civil powers in past ages for good or for evil? Is their present divorce an advance or a retrogression in Christian civilisation?

I need not point out that these questions are inevitable; they are forced upon us; they underlie the whole continental revolution against the Holy See; they are mixed up in the foreign policy of every government; they are ventilated in every newspaper; Catholics cannot meet in a congress without being overtaken by them as by a spring-tide; they enter into the duties of every Englishman who possesses the trust of a vote or the responsibility of influence; they are the fine wedges which are rending us asunder, and throwing many, who are otherwise sound in faith, upon a stream which will carry them not only away from the spirit of the Church, but, at last, into opposition to the Holy See. Do not think I exaggerate, or speak as a theorist. Every parish priest will know that the subtilest form of political sedition is at this moment being propagated among our Catholics in England by brotherhoods, secret socie ties, and obscure newspapers. For all this we must prepare ourselves. If we need a last reason to attract us to these studies, we may find it in the allocution of the Holy Father at the canonisation in 1862, in which all the faithful of every nation and people were warned to beware of the anti-social and anti-Christian principles of modern political theories.

3. Once more, the relation of philosophy to faith lies at the foundation of the chief intellectual problems of the day. Without a clear decision on this subject there can be no sufficient treatment of the first truths of theology. The most lamentable aberrations of these later years may in some cases be traced to a single philosophical error, which, like a morbid particle in the blood, will produce death.

A certain class of modern metaphysical philosophers has been well subdivided into objective and subjective atheists, and yet these writers are read both without and within the Church in England without scruple or hesitation. Happily many men are not consequent, and many have no conception of the character and reach of the books they read. Inconsequence and unconsciousness preserve them from the evil of the anti-Catholic and anti-Christian philosophy by which they are surrounded.

A still more urgent subject is the relation of Faith and the Church to Science. It would seem to be too trivial to go on repeating, that between revelation and science there can be no opposition; that the works of God are His words, and the words of God are His works, and that both are in absolute harmony. In the Divine mind they are one truth: in the Divine action they may be only partially and successively developed. They may for a time seem to be diverse, and to involve discrepancies of signification; but ultimately and essentially they must be one, even as God is one. ' Deus scientiarum Tu es.' God is the fountain of all sciences. For this cause Catholics have no fear of science, scientifically elaborated and scientifically treated. They have no fear of any accumulation of facts and phenomena, truly such, nor of any induction or conclusion scientifically established. They fear only science unscientifically handled, superficial observations, hasty generalisations, reckless opposition to revelation, and undissembled readiness to reject revelation rather than doubt of a modern theory about flint instruments and hyena's bones. It is, indeed, true that Catholics have an intense dislike and hostility to such science as this, and to all its modifications. They hold it to be guilty, not only of lese majeste against the Christian revelation, but against the truth and dignity of science itself. They abhor — and I accuse myself of being a ringleader in this abhorrence — the science now in fashion, which I take leave to call ' the brutal philosophy,' to wit, there is no God, and the ape is our Adam.

How necessary it is for Catholics to prepare themselves on the relation of society and of science to the Church, may be seen by what passed the other day: as at Malines, so at Munich. Catholics cannot meet without being forced into the time-spirit. We do not live in an exhausted receiver. The Middle Ages are passed. There is no zone of calms for us. We are in the modern world — in the trade winds of the nineteenth century, and we -must brace ourselves to lay hold of the world as it grapples with us, and to meet it intellect to intellect, culture to culture, science to science.

For in these last centuries, first politics and now science have fallen away from the faith. This is the paradisiacal state according to some. To others it is the dissolution of the Christian society of the world carried out to its last consequence. Now it will be a subject very proper to the sessions of the Academia to discuss whether Science has any dependence upon

Faith, or whether it be independent in a province of its own; whether it be scientific to threaten the received chronology with a jaw-bone found at Amiens, or with cities submerged in lakes, or with formations arbitrarily assumed to be slow in their accretion and the like; or whether it be not the part of Science to proceed with the docility of a learner, and the patience of an interrogator, waiting for the answers of Nature, who will not be rudely or contemptuously questioned, but demands of its disciples the reverence and the piety of sous to its great Creator.

Lastly — for I must not trespass longer upon your patience— under the name of Science is included not only Metaphysics and Physics, but also the scientific treatment of Theology, Philosophy, and History in its relation to theological science. In this sense it goes to the root of faith. I cannot better illustrate my meaning than by quoting the words of a Swiss theologian, Giigler, whose works I do not pretend to know beyond the passage which I have met in quotation. Either that passage does adequately represent the mind of the writer, or it does not. With this I have less to do than with its inevitable effect on the mind of the reader. ' We are to believe,' says the author to his antagonists, ' the voice of the Church, you say, without seeking to understand; but where do we hear this voice? Not in your mouths, certainly, or with the ears of the body; it must be sought for in history, and in the written records of the Church. We must examine each document historically in order to know whether it is the authentic expression of the mind of the Church without interpolation; only then does faith begin.' ' Embrace reason and science, become what you ought to be; and your kingdom will rise again from the dead.'4

First, I would wish to know who we are who are bound to examine each document historically? and next, what documents? and lastly, for the establishment of what doctrines? Does it signify that the faithful are to receive the articles of their Baptismal Creed from documents historically examined by each one for him self, and not from the voice of the Church? Or the interpretation of those articles, or the interpretation of Scripture? And is it only after examination of each document historically that faith begins? Have they no faith before baptism, nor after baptism, till they become historical critics?

If by these high-sounding phrases be meant only that we must know what we believe, and why we believe, before we believe it, or that reason is the preamble of faith, there is no need of such imposing phraseology, nor of any discovery. We may answer with S. Augustin, * Absit ut ideo credamus ne rationem accipiamus, sive quaeramus, quum etiam credere non possemus nisi rationabiles animas haberemus.'5 But if it be meant that science precedes faith, and that the unscientific have no faith, I would leave the writer to reconcile himself with the Prophet who says, ' Nisi credideritis non Intel - ligetis,' and with S. Augustin, who with the principle transfixes the pretensions of the Manichees. We are

4 Home and Foreign Revieiv, July 18G3, p. 194.

5 S. Aug. Epist. cxx. 3, torn, ii, p. 347.

VOL. I. H

THE SUBJECTS PROPER TO THE ACADEMTA.

no lovers of darkness, nor of the kingdom of the dead, and we have, I hope, as ardent a love of science and reason as any men of our time; but we have learned in the school of those doctors and saints who teach that faith is a rational act, and that to believe is the condition of understanding, and understanding the reward of faith. * Si a me,' says S. Augustiu, ' aut a quolibet alio doctore non irrationabiliter flagitas, ut quod credis intelligas, corrige definitionem tuam, non ut fidem respuas, sed ut ea, qure fidei firmitate jam tenes, etiani rationis luce conspicias.... Et ideo rationabiliter dictum est per Prophetam, " nisi credideritis non iiitelligetis.'"

Again he says: ' Sed prius Sanctarum Scripturarum auctoritatibus colla subdenda suut, ut ad intellectum per lidem quisque perveniat.'6

And once more, for the principle pervades the works of S. Augustin from beginning to end:

' Sed aunt quidam, inquit, in vobis qui non crcdunt. Non dicit, sunt quidam in vobis qui non intelligunt: sed causam dixit, quare non intelligant. Sunt enim quidam in robis qui non credunt: et ideo non intelli gunt, quia non credunt. Propheta enim dixit, Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. Per fidem copulamur, per intellectum vivificamur. Prius haereamus per fidem, ut sit quod vivificetur per intellectum. Nam qui non hjeret, resistit: qui resistit, non credit. Nam qui resistit, quomodo vivificatur? Adversarius est radio lucis, quo penetrandus est: non avertit aciem, sed • De Peccatorum Mentis, cap. xxi. 16 D. torn. x. p. 16.

claudit mentem. Sunt ergo quidam qui non credunt. Credant et aperiant, aperiant et illuminabuntur.'7

In a word, it is not science which generates faith, but faith which generates science by the aid of the reason illuminated by revelation.

In what I have hitherto said, I have assumed one truth as undeniable and axiomatic, namely, that God has revealed Himself; that He hath committed this reve lation to His Church; and that He preserves both His revelation and His Church in all ages by His own presence and assistance from all error in faith and morals. Now inasmuch as certain primary truths— which may be naturally known of God and the soul, and of the relations of the soul with God, and of man with man, that is, certain truths discoverable also in the order of nature by reason or by philosophy— are taken up into and incorporated with the revelation of God, the Church possesses the first principles of rational philosophy and of natural ethics both for individuals and for society. And inasmuch as these principles are the great regulating truths of philosophy and natural morality, including natural politics, the Church has a voice, a testimony, and a jurisdiction within these provinces of natural knowledge. I do not affirm the Church to be a philosophical authority, but I may affirm it to be a witness in philosophy. Much more when we come to treat of Christian philosophy or the Theodicea, or Christian morals and Christian politics; for these are no more than the truths of nature grafted upon the stock of revelation and elevated to a super- 7 In Joan. Evang. cap. vi. tract, xxvii. torn. iii. p. 504.

natural perfection. To exclude the discernment and voice of the Church from philosophy and politics is to degrade both by reducing them to the natural order. First it pollards them, and next it deprives them of the corroboration of a higher evidence. Against this the whole array of Catholic theologians and philosophers has always contended. They have maintained that the tradition of theological and ethical knowledge is divinely preserved, and has a unity in itself; that there is a true traditive philosophy running down in the same channel with the divine tradition of faith, recognised by faith as true by the light of nature, and guarded by the circle of supernatural truths by which faith has surrounded it. In saying this I am not extending the infallibility of the Church to philosophical or political questions apart from their contact with revelation; but affirming only that the radical truths of the natural order have become rooted in the substance of faith, and are guaranteed to us by the witness and custody of the Church. So likewise, as the laws of Christian civilisation are the laws of natural morality elevated by the Christian law, which is expounded and applied by the Church, there is a tradition both of private and public ethics, or in other words of morality and jurisprudence, which forms the basis of all personal duty and of all political justice. In this again the Church has a discernment, and therefore a voice. A distribution of labour in the cultivation of all provinces of truth is prudent and intelligible: a division of authority and an exclusion of the Church from science is not only a dismemberment of the kingdom of truth, but n forcible rending of vital truths from their highest evidence. Witness the treatment of the question whether the existence of God can he proved, and whether God can he known hy natural reason, in the hands of those who turn their backs upon the tradition of evidence in the universal Church. Unless revelation be an illusion, the voice of the Church must be heard in these higher provinces of human knowledge. Newton, as Dr. Newman says, ' cannot dispense with the meta physician, nor the metaphysician with us.' Into cosmogony the Church must enter by the doctrine of creation; into natural theology by the doctrine of the existence and perfections of God; into ethics by the doctrine of the cardinal virtues; into politics by the indissolubility of marriage, the root of human society, as divorce is its dissolution. And by this mterpenetration and interweaving of its teaching, the Church binds all sciences to itself. They meet in it as in their proper centre. As the sovereign power which runs into all provinces unites them in one Empire, so the voice and witness of the Church unite, and bind all sciences in one.

It is the parcelling and morselling out of science, and the disintegration of the tradition of truth, which has reduced the intellectual culture of England to its present fragmentary and contentious state. Not only errors are generated, but truths are set in opposition; science and revelation are supposed to be at variance, and revelation to be the weaker side of human know ledge.

The Church hasan infallible knowledge of the original revelation. Its definitions of Divine faith fall within this limit. But its infallible judgments reach beyond it. The Church possesses a knowledge of truth which belongs also to the natural order. The existence of God — His power, goodness, and perfections — the moral law written in the conscience — are truths of the natural order which are declared also by revelation, and recorded in Holy Scripture. These truths the Church knows by a twofold light — by the supernatural light of revelation, and by the natural light which all men possess. In the Church this natural light is concentrated us in a focus. The great endowment of common sense — that is, the generis humani communis sensus — the maximum of light and evidence for certain truths of the natural order, resides eminently in the collective intelligence of the Church, that is to say, in the intelligence of the faithful, which is the seat of its passive infallibility, and in the intelligence of the pastors, or the Mayisterium Ecclcs'uc, which is the organ of its active infallibility. That two and two make four is not more evident to the Catholic Church than to the rest of mankind, to S. Thomas or S. Bonaventura than to Spinoza and Comte. But that God exists, and that man is responsible, because free, are moral truths, and for the perception of moral truths even of the natural order a moral discernment is needed; and the moral discernment of the Church, even of natural truths, is, I maintain, incomparably higher than the moral discernment of the mass of mankind, by virtue of its elevation to greater purity and closer conformity to the laws of nature.

The highest object of human science is God; and theology, properly so called, is the science of His nature and perfections, the radiance which surrounds ' the Father of light, in whom is no change, neither shadow of vicissitude.' Springing from this central science flow the sciences of the works of God, in nature and in grace; and under the former fall not only the physical sciences, but those also which relate to man and to his action — as morals, politics, and history. Now the revelation God has given us rests for its centre upon God Himself, but in its course describes a circumference within which many truths of the natural order relating both to the world and to man are included. These the Church knows not only by natural light, but by Divine revelation, and declares by Divine assistance. But these primary truths of the natural order are axioms and principles of the sciences within which they properly fall. And these truths of philosophy belong also to the domain of faith. The same truths are the objects of faith and of science; they are the links which couple these sciences to revelation. How, then, can these sciences be separated from their relation to revealed truth without a false procedure? No Catholic could so separate them; for these truths enter within the dogma of faith. No Christian who believes in Holy Scripture could do so; for they are included in Holy Writ. No mere philosopher could do so; for thereby he would discard and perhaps place himself in opposition and discord with the maximum of evidence which is attainable on these primary verities, and therefore with the common sense not only of Christendom, but of mankind. In this I am not advocating a mixture or confusion of religion and philosophy, which, as Lord Bacon says, in his work DC Aitff mentis Scientiarum, 'will undoubtedly make an heretical religion and an imaginary and fabulous philosophy,' but affirming that certain primary truths of both physical and ethical philosophy are delivered to us by revelation, and that we cannot neglect them as our starting-points in such sciences without a false procedure and a palpable forfeiture of truth. Such verities are, for instance, the existence of God, the creation of the world, the freedom of the will, the moral office of the conscience, and the like. Lord Bacon says, again: ' There may be veins and lines, but not sections or separations,' in the great continent of Truth. All truths alike are susceptible of scientific method, and all of a religious treatment. The father cf modern philosophy, as men of our day call him, so severe and imperious in maintaining the distinct province and process of science, is not the less peremptory and absolute as to the unity of all truth and the vital relation of all true science to the Divine philosophy of revelation.

In confirmation of what I have said, I will use better words than my own. In the second of the well-known Lectures on University Education," Dr. Newman, treating of the relation of theology to other sciences, speaks as follows: ' Summing up, gentlemen, what I have said, I lay it down that all knowledge forms one whole, because its subject-matter is one; for the universe in its length and breadth is so intimately knit

8 Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Education, J. H. Newman, Disc. II.

together that we cannot separate off portion from portion, and operation from operation, except by a mental abstraction; and then, again, as to its Creator, though He, of course, in His own Being, is infinitely separated from it, yet He has so implicated Himself with it, and taken it into His very bosom, by His presence in it, His providence over it, His impressions upon it, and His influences through it, that we cannot truly or fully contemplate it without contemplating Him. Next, sciences are the results of that mental abstraction which I have spoken of, being the logical record of this or that aspect of the whole subject-matter of knowledge. As they all belong to one and the same circle of objects, they are one and all connected together; as they are but aspects of things, they are severally incomplete in their relation to the things themselves, though complete in their own idea and for their own respective purposes; on both accounts they at once need and subserve each other. And further, the comprehension of the bearings of one science on another, and the use, of each to each, and the location and limitation, and adjustment and due appreciation of them all, one with another — this belongs, I conceive, to a sort of science distinct from all of them, and in some sense a science of sciences, which is my own conception of what is meant by philosophy, in the true sense of the word.'

Further on he says: ' What theology gives, it has a right to take; or rather the interests of truth oblige it to take. If we would not be beguiled by dreams, if we would ascertain facts as they are, then, granting theology as a real science, we cannot exclude it, and still call ourselves philosophers. I have asserted nothing as yet as to the pre-eminent dignity of religious truth; I only say, if there be religious truth at all, we cannot shut our eyes to it without prejudice to truth of every kind, physical, metaphysical, historical, and moral: for it bears upon all truth. And thus I answer the objection with which I opened this discourse. I supposed the question put to me by a philosopher of the day, " Why cannot you go your way, and let us go ours?" I answer, in the name of theology, "When Newton can dispense with the metaphysician, then may you dispense with us."...

' Man, with his motives and works, his languages, his propagation, his diffusion, is from Him [God]. Agriculture, medicine, and the arts of life are His gift. Society, laws, government — He is their sanction. The pageant of earthly royalty has the semblance and the benediction of the Eternal King. Peace and civilisa tion, commerce and adventure, wars when just, conquest when humane and necessary, have His co-operation and His blessing upon them. The course of events, the revolution of empires, the rise and fall of states, the periods and eras, the progresses and the retrogressions of the world's history, not indeed the incidental sin, over-abundant as it is, but the great outlines and the issues of human affairs, are from His disposition. The elements, and types, and seminal principles, and constructive powers of the moral -world, in ruins though it be, are to be referred to Him. He " enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world."..

' If this be a sketch, accurate in substance, and, as far as it goes, of the doctrines proper to theology, and especially of the doctrine of a particular Providence, which is the portion of it most on a level with human sciences, I cannot understand at all how, supposing it to be true, it can fail, considered as knowledge, to exert a powerful influence on philosophy, literature, and every intellectual creation or discovery whatever. I cannot understand how it is possible, as the phrase goes, to blink the question of its truth or falsehood. It meets us with a profession and a proffer of the highest truths of which the human mind is capable; it em braces a range of subjects the most diversified and distant from each other. What science will not find one part or other of its province traversed by its path? What results of philosophic speculation are unquestionable, if they have been gained without inquiry as to what theology had to say to them? Does it cast no light upon history? Has it no influence upon the principles of ethics? Is it without any sort of bearing on physics, metaphysics, and political, science? Can we drop it out of the circle of knowledge, without allow ing either that that circle is thereby mutilated, or, on the other hand, that theology is no science?'

Such being the essential unity of all truth, and such the mind and instinct of the Church, it is no wonder that humble and pious minds not largely cultivated beyond their Catechism should turn with fear and suspicion from the pursuit of science. It is deplorable, but not wonderful, that they should be thereby set against the progress of scientific knowledge. But on whom rests the blame? Without question, on us, who profess to know better, if we so use our better know ledge as to o fiend and to affright our weaker brethren. Life is short, and at longest there is little time for the pursuit of knowledge. Better to use it for science silently and humbly. There is as little fear of our modern philosophers being burnt for magic, or even accused of it by their ignorant contemporaries, as of our attaining the intellectual superiority of Sylvester II. or Nicolas of Cusa. Nothing is gained to science, still less to charity, by a tone of pretentious menace; such as, ' If the facts of geology are contrary to the Catholic faith, let the Catholic faith look to it.' We need no such admonitions, be they threats or warnings. It would inspire us with more confidence in their science and humility, if our geologists said: ' If the facts of geology are contrary to the Catholic faith, let geology look to its facts.' It is much easier to trumpet about facts than to fix them. Even in our own short lifetime we have seen the facts of geology to be made, unmade, remade, and made over again, I know not how many times. The nature and origin of man has been so often fixed and unfixed that I am in doubt whether I am descended, as I said, from Adam or from an ape, or from a jelly, or from a capsule, or whether I am created at all, or am a transient manifestation of an uncreated whole, that is, whether I am man or Pan, whom I revered in boyhood, but never aspired to be. And this is science. Truly the Catholic faith has not much need to fear it, save only for the half-learned, vain-glorious, pretentious, and unbelieving. But they are many. To illustrate my meaning from a high authority not to be suspected of partiality to us, I will quote the words of Mr. Lewes, the hierophant or archimandrite of Comtism, or as I have ventured to call it in respect to theology, the Brutal Philosophy. After a review in four volumes of the triumph and progress of philosophy along the via sacra of ages from the seven friends of our boyhood, Thales, Pythagoras, Solon, £c., through Anaximenes, Anaximander, to Spinoza, Locke, Reid, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, to Auguste Comte, he sums up the paean in this melancholy strophe which closes his last volume: ' Modern philosophy opens with a method — Bacon; and ends with a method — Comte; and in each case this method leads to positive science, and sets metaphysics aside. Within these limits we have wit nessed various efforts to solve the problems of philosophy; and all these efforts have ended in scepti cism.'9

It sounds like the voice of the buffoon in the chariot reminding Caesar that he is but a man.

The mission, then, of the Catholic Church in Eng land at this moment is a noble and beneficent work, that of calling home, first, truths to their proper centre, and then men to those truths.

It has first to reorganise the elements of Christian belief which lie scattered in fragments around its unity. And this it is already doing beyond all hope: even error is working with it, revealing its own incoherence. It is certain that as the Catholic Church stands at this hour in England the only witness for unity of faith, so in ten years it will be recognised as the only Divine D Vol. iv. p. 263.

evidence, and therefore the only certain authority, for the inspiration and canon of Holy Scripture.

It is the duty, therefore, of Catholics to prepare themselves for the future which Is hefore them. They little thought thirty years ago to be as they are now.

They little thought ten years ago of the majestic expansion of the Catholic Church at this hour, and of its dignified attitude of calm in the midst of the religious confusion and dissolution which is around it. Still less can we anticipate what the next ten years may bring. The advance of the Church is in geometrical progression.

And in proportion as it regains the intelligence of the English people, the hearts of men will turn to it sicut torrens in austro. It will be seen to be in England also what it ever has been in the civilised world — the mother and nurse of all intellectual culture. The people of England are already beginning to hear its voice and to recognise it as the pleading of truth, charity, and common sense.

IV.

FATHEK FABEK.

Footnotes

1. A Letter to the Lord Bithop of London on the State of Subscrip- ↩