VIII. Inaugural Address

WHEN I received the invitation of the Bishop of Salford to deliver the inaugural address at the opening of this Academia I had a special motive which made me very gladly accept it. Ahout eleven years ago, it fell to my lot, by command of my Bishop, the late Cardinal, during his last illness, to take a foremost part in founding the Academia of the Catholic religion in London. The Cardinal himself was unable to undertake the work, and he deputed me to fulfil it. According to the best of my power I executed the task. The Cardinal published at the time an invitation to those who would become members of the Academia, from which I will read a few words. •' Next to the exercise of its purest spiritual office, the Church has in all ages bestowed its special care on the cultivation of the intellect and the advancement of science, making the Word of God the interpretation of His works, and His works the illustration of His Word, and the science of God the centre and light of the manifold and various orders of human knowledge. For this cause the Church of God has always given special encouragement to the studies which demonstrate the connection between science and revealed religion, thereby applying the truths and laws of the intellectual and natural world to the confirmation of the faith.'1 Cardinal Wiseman then went on to say, that at the beginning of the present century, when the sceptical and infidel literature of Germany and France penetrated throughout Europe, there was formed an Academia in Kome for the pur pose of cultivating this special aspect of science; and he next affirmed that the circumstances of our day seemed to demand in England an institution of the same kind; that * the intellectual condition of England at that moment was such as to alarm the least anxious as to the divergence of sacred and secular science, and the unnatural position in which they seemed to stand; and that rationalistic tendencies of thought in. an advanced form had explicitly shown themselves in the most educated centres of England.' Such was the- purpose with which the Academia was founded in the diocese of Westminster. It has endured for eleven years, I am happy to say, without flagging. Its sessions have been maintained, papers have been read which have been printed and published in three volumes, of which two lie here before me. Of their quality you must judge for yourselves. I can say that the benefit of the Academia has been very great. It has, first of all, attracted and bound together a number of Catholics of all ages; men who desire to cultivate

1 Preface to vol. i. Essays on Eeligion and Literature (Longmans,. 1865).

science and literature in relation to faith. It has enabled them to correspond, and to co-operate together, and to form what I may call a Catholic opinion outside of faith. I have observed a very perceptible growth of a solid Catholic opinion resulting, in my belief, in no small degree from the action of the Academia. These, I believe, are the motives which have made you desire to transplant, as it were, the Academia to Manchester. 1. The late Cardinal, in the instructive passage from which I have already quoted, spoke pointedly of the visible tendency which exists in England to separate off science and to oppose it to faith. The other day there fell into my hands an example of this tendency. I do not refer to it in any spirit hostile to the writer. I am under no temptation to do so, for I know him personally, and can bear testimony to his highly amiable and excellent private character. He is a man endowed with a singular facility and beauty of imagination, a strange subtilty of thought, a poetic power which seems to tinge and to pervade even his science; and when he gambols in the world of light, which is his own, and floats in the azure amidst the beauties and the glories of the empyrean, no one is more ready than I am to admire and acknowledge the singular gifts of which he is possessed. But when a spirit so ethereal clothes itself in the buff jerkin of Cromwell's Ironsides, or in the mailed coat of a Lutheran trooper, it seems to me somewhat incongruous, and I trust I may be pardoned by my friend if I regard his masquerade with some little kindly amusement. Well, the other day a letter under the VOL. n.

title, 'The Vatican and Physics,' appeared in that broadsheet which flies over the whole world, and therefore I may freely use it. The writer quoted a passage of singular excellence from the Bishop of Montpellier, who, addressing the Dean and Professors of Montpellier, laid down what I may call the first principles which you, as members of the Academia, are bound stoutly to affirm. The Bishop said: ' Now, gentlemen, the whole Church holds herself to be invested with the absolute right to teach mankind. She holds herself to be the depository of the truth, not a fragmentary truth, not a mixture of certainty and hesitation, but the total truth, complete from a religious point of view. Much more; she is so sure of the infallibility conferred on her by the Divine Founder as the magnificent dowry of their indissoluble alliance, that even in the natural order of things, scientific or philosophical, moral or political, she will not admit that a system can be adopted and sustained by Christians if it contradicts definite dogmas. She considers that the voluntary and obstinate denial of a single point of her doctrine involves the crime of heresy, and she holds that all formal heresy, if it be not courageously rejected prior to appearing before God, carries with it the certain loss of grace and of eternity. As defined by Pope Leo X., at the Sixth Council of the Lateran, truth cannot contradict itself; consequently every assertion contrary to a revealed verity of faith is necessarily and absolutely false. It follows from this, without entering into the examination of this or that question of physiology, that solely by the certitude of our dogmas we are able to pronounce judgment on any hypothesis which is an Antichristian engine of war rather than a serious conquest over the secrets and mysteries of Nature.' Then follow the words of my friend in his letter to the Times: 'Liberty is a fine word, tyranny a hateful one, and both have been eloquently employed of late in reference to the dealings of the secular arm with the pretensions of the Vatican. But "liberty" has two mutually exclusive meanings — the liberty of Eome to teach mankind, and the liberty of the human race. Neither reconcilement nor compromise is possible here. One "liberty" or the other must go down. This in our clay is the " conflict " so impressively described by Draper, in which every thoughtful man must take a part. There is no dimness in the eyes of Home as regards her own aims; she sees with a clearness unapproached by others that the school will be either her stay or her ruin. Hence the supreme effort she is now making to obtain the control of education; hence the assertion made by the Bishop of Montpellier of her " absolute right " to teach man kind. She has, moreover, already tasted the fruits of this control in Bavaria, where the very liberality of an enlightened king led to the fatal mistake of confiding the schools of the kingdom to the "Doctors of Eome." ' Now I must answer that if the Catholic Church has the liberty to teach all mankind, this does not necessarily deprive all mankind of the liberty which mankind seems to claim of disbelieving what she teaches. The Catholic Church puts no force or strain upon mankind further than the jurisdiction which evident truth has over the intellect and over the conscience. There is nothing ' mutually exclusive ' here, except that wheresoever truth manifests its light, and the reason of man is convinced, he is bound to helieve it. This is, indeed, a jurisdiction of truth which a man of science would hardly reject. Professor Tyndall went on to say, ' There is no dimness in the eyes of Eome as regards its own aims; she sees with a clearness unapproached by others that the school will be either her stay or her ruin.' "Well, I will be bold to say that the school has never been the ruin of the Catholic Church yet, and never will be. Whether the school was the stay of the Church I will not stop to pronounce; but I am sure of this, that the Church has been the creator of every school, and therefore it seems to me that we have no need to fear the multiplication of schools of science — if, indeed, they are schools of science, and not schools of perverted intellect. That, and that alone, is what we fear. In order that I may more clearly bring out what is the relation of the Church and of Faith to matters of science, I will read a passage from the great Doctor on whose philosophy we rest firmly to this day — S. Thomas Aquinas — who in his book, Contra Gentes, says: ' Falsehood alone is contrary to truth. Whatso ever arguments may be laid down as against the teach ings of faith, they cannot proceed rightly from the first principles of Nature, which are known by themselves. Therefore they have not the force of demonstration, but are either probabilities or sophistries, and there is a way of solving them still open ' (lib. i. ch. vii.). The Vatican Council says: ' But though faith be above reason, yet no true variance can ever exist between faith and reason, since the same God who reveals mysteries and inspires faith implanted the light of reason in the mind of man. But God cannot contradict Himself; nor can truth ever contradict truth. Every assertion, therefore, contrary to the illumination of faith we define to be altogether false. More over the Church, which, together with the apostolic office of teaching, received commandment to guard the deposit of faith, has both the right and the duty of Divine commission to proscribe science falsely so called ' (First Const., On Catholic Faith, chap. iv.)« Once more, in the chapter on the relation of faith to reason, the Council says: ' Wherefore, so far from truth is it that the Church is opposed to the cultivation of human arts and knowledge that in many ways the Church helps and promotes that culture; for it neither ignores nor despises the benefits which flow into the life of men from such arts and knowledge, but it ever recognises them as coming from God the Lord of science, so that if rightly treated they lead by God's grace to Himself. Nor does it indeed forbid that all such arts and sciences should employ their own proper principles and their own proper method within their own limits; but, recognising this just liberty, it is carefully on its guard lest by conflicting with Divine teaching they receive error into themselves, or by going beyond their proper boundaries they invade and disturb the things which are of faith' (ibid.). These are the principles which the Church has laid down on the relation in which it stands towards science and the physical world. I will endeavour to point out somewhat in detail what is the application of these principles, and bring it to bear upon the work of the Academia.

2. For the last three hundred years there has been an attempt continually going on to effect two things — first, to separate science and politics from revelation; and secondly, to oppose science and politics to the Church. For three hundred years this labour has been incessant. We have been told that the Church has no jurisdiction within the realms of science. We have been told that it ought to have nothing to do with politics. In fact, the world has tried to send the Church to Coventry. I am afraid that, as when the messenger came to Diogenes and told him that the Athenians had banished him, he said, ' Well, then, Diogenes banishes the Athenians,' so the Church, when she receives that courteous message from the men of science, must make a respectful bow, and say, ' We are afraid we must banish you.' But the Church does not banish science. It banishes only those who under the name of science would break up the unity of all knowledge, which, as it comes from one Source and one Author,, may be distinguished, as Lord Bacon said, by rivers and boundaries like a continent, but cannot be parted; it is one indivisible whole. First of all, we have it from the Vatican Council that there is no opposition between reason, however cultivated and scientific, and faith; but that reason is made perfect by faith. For reason is a Divine light in the order of Nature, whereby we can attain a knowledge of the world and of the physical sciences of the world by observation; together with the knowledge which lies within the ken and reach of the senses and of the intellect: and also the knowledge of ourselves. If reason be a Divine light, faith also is a Divine light, of the supernatural order, illuminating and elevating reason to a more perfect knowledge, not only of God, but of man and of morals, that is, of the relations between God and man. Then certainly there can be no discord and no conflict between reason and.faith. In truth, the wreck of the world came from intellectual error, and the begin ning of intellectual error was a word which I am afraid the men of science will not forgive me if I say any thing to discredit. We are told by Lord Bacon that science is a ' questioning of Nature.' Well, the word which first perverted the reason was 'Why.' 'Why hath God said?' and then the contradiction, ' God hath not said:' and then it suggested a motive, ' for God doth know,' and ' ye shall be as gods.' Out of these intellectual temptations came the first intellectual perversion, and after that perversion of the intellect came the perverted act of the will. In truth, there can be no act of the will which does not pass through the intellect. There cannot be an act of the will unless the reason have first proposed to itself a motive for its action. Intellect is said in philosophy to carry the light before the will, to show the path; and therefore right knowledge has a close relation to the will, and a perverted intellect is the destruction of the will. The will is perverted at the same moment as the intellect, for the will conforms itself to the dictates of reason, or, to put it in the formula of a wise man who used to say, one error in principle is worse than a hundred errors in practice. A hundred errors in practice may be nothing more than occasional blundering, but one error in principle is the perpetual and inexhaustible source of an indefinite number of errors. There can be no act of the will which is not preceded by an act of reason. When once the reason is perverted the will follows in that perversion.

Let us go a little further. It follows from this that the rectification or sanctification of the intellect is a vital part of the commission of the Church. ' Go ye and teach all nations;' ' Go ye and make disciples of all nations,' is the full rendering of these words. This lays down a primary truth. The teaching begins in the intellect; and the rectification of the intellect, if the will obeys, rectifies the will; and in this great commission of the Church the rectification of the intellect of the world, and the restoration of it to the true know ledge of God, the true knowledge of man, and the true knowledge of morals, — all this is a vital condition of the restoration of mankind to the • image to which he was created. The Church in the Vatican Council has defined its office of guarding the knowledge of science in all its contacts with revelation. It leaves to every science, as it has expressly declared, a full and just liberty to use its own principles and methods within its own limits. It only interposes when, exceeding those limits and trespassing upon the realm of revelation, science invades that which is not its own, and perturbs the truths of faith — that is to say, whenever science comes in contact with revelation there revelation is supreme, and there, as S. Thomas Aquinas has laid it down in the words I have read, apparent demonstrations are not demonstrations. They may be plausible, and for a time they may be treated as probabilities, but they are so phistries, and in the end they will be solved and pass away. It follows again from this that it is not possible to send the Church to Coventry, because the- commission of the Church pervades in some sort all the regions of science. As we say of sovereignty, its jurisdiction runs everywhere: so we say of revelation. For instance, what would seem further from revelation than the physical science of geology and the like? and yet the words, ' In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,' enter into physical science. The creation of the world is an axiom, I may say, even in the physical science of the world, and an axiom derived from revelation. It was precisely this axiom which made the distinction between the heretics of old, who ascribed the existence of the world to the eternity of matter or to the creative power of an inferior or evil being. The creation, then, is an axiom of science, which from revelation runs into geology. Again, the descent of man from a single pair and the unity of man kind are also truths of revelation, against which a multitude of scientific men, if I may so call them, are at-this moment contending, with every weapon and every instrument they can wield, to destroy our certainty. In this question revelation has its -place, and no man who believes in the revelation of God can yield a hair's breadth. Metaphysics, pure mental philosophy, would - seem to lie outside of revelation, but the question arises, Is there such a thing as a soul? or does matter think? Here again revelation has something to say. Once more, is there such a thing as a moral sense, or are right and wrong mere conventional sensations arising out of the habit of attaching a sense of fear or shame to particular actions? Or again, are moral habits learnt, as I once heard a very notable and ready speaker maintain, like the tumbling of pigeons? Tumbling, he said, is only a skilful evolution which the parent bird teaches its young to make. The young ones learn to follow paren tal example, and under the training so acquired they form the habit of tumbling, and transmit it to posterity. So in like manner the notions of right and wrong are said to be acquired, and to have no foundation in the intrinsic distinction of things. Here again revelation has something to say. There is a soul, there is a conscience, there is a supreme Lawgiver. Thus reve lation runs with its jurisdiction into mental philosophy and into metaphysics. We are told also that religion has nothing to do with politics. I would ask, what are politics but the collective morals of men living together in society? The moral laws which govern man as an individual govern him if he be the member of a community; be it the community of a household or the community of a State. I can find no distinction be tween morals and politics but this — that politics are morals upon a large scale, and that morals are politics upon a narrow scale. When I am told that morals and politics are to be separated, or that politics and religion are to be separated, I answer: if you cannot separate politics from morals, and cannot separate morals from religion, then it will be very difficult to separate politics from religion. In fact they make one whole, and hence revelation and the Divine law enter into the whole range of political science. I do not mean to say that revelation has to do immediately with questions of excise or with the penalties for smuggling. I am not speaking of politics in that minute sense, but of the great constructive laws by which human society is held together. 3. If that be so, it is clear, and beyond doubt, that the Catholic Church hasan all-important office in these matters, and that there is no power upon earth that can separate either science or society from revelation. The Church having a Divine liberty as the witness which God has constituted in the world to deliver His revelation, and being the sole fountain of that knowledge, has within its sphere a sovereignty, and that sovereignty is one which is exempt from all control of human authority. No authority on earth can intervene to dictate to the Church what it has to teach, or within what limits it shall teach. There is no authority to determine whether the Church shall teach or not this or that doctrine. It is therefore not only exempt, but supreme, and being supreme, there can be no appeal from it. It is the highest and final judge of what is the faith and what is the law of God, and when science and politics come into contact with that faith and that law it admits of no appeal from its own decision to any tribunal out of itself, to any judge of appeal in the past or in the future. It stands as sole witness to the truth which God has planted in the world. If that he so, then it follows as a general conclusion that the attempt to separate theology from science and society is both contrary to faith and contrary to reason. I will go so far as to affirm that science has never yet demonstrated anything contrary to faith. When men talk of Galileo, I answer that Galileo did not demonstrate. He enunciated a hypo thesis, and that hypothesis was not demonstrated for a century afterwards. Lord Bacon lived and died disbelieving the hypothesis. Sir Thomas Brown, one of the greatest literary men of the seventeenth century, also died disbelieving it. When Newton demonstrated the law of gravitation, he demonstrated nothing to touch the faith; but as soon as he proved it, the Church at once recognised it. It had carefully guarded the popular and visible interpretation of the historical words of Scripture, lest without cause the mind of man should be perturbed, and doubts should be insinuated without necessity or power of solution; but as soon as that demonstration was made the Church gave full scope to science to use its own method and its own principles within its own limits, as the Vatican Council has declared. The language of Holy Scripture in this matter is the language of men, as it is the language of sense, which we use to this very day. We still say ' the sun rises' and ' the sun sets,' in spite of Galileo and in spite of Newton. We use the language of sense, which is the only language that the mass of men can understand, and we do so because Scripture is not a revelation of science. The revelation which God has given us is in another sphere and on another plane. It has no collision with physical science, because it is not a revelation of science. It has come into contact with the facts of the world in the points here spoken of, in the creation, in the nature of man, in his social and moral life, in his free will, in the law written upon the conscience, in his responsibility. These are matters of revelation in its proper province. The question whether or no the world moves round the sun or the sun moves round the world is a matter of science on which there is no revelation. I am bold enough to say that there never has been any demonstration of science which is in contradiction with any of the truths of revelation, and those who put that theory forward put it forward either from want of a clear knowledge of what revelation is, or from some mistaken opinion of their own which they suppose to be scientific. In like manner, I may say that society — the social and political orders of mankind — in the sense which I have been describing, has no doctrines or laws contrary to the faith. That must be self-evident, for what is society but the natural order and state of man in which he is placed by virtue of his birth and of the relations which are formed round about him? These are from God; and the authority and order and law and obedience which constitute domestic life expand into the civil order of politics. The order of Nature is from God, and is there fore Divine. The Church and revelation are likewise from Him, and the whole order and authority of the Church • are in perfect harmony, the supernatural with the natural. There does not exist either a law or a truth in respect to politics which is out of harmony with the law of faith.

4. If that be so, I may obviously draw another very definite conclusion: I mean that the isolation of theo logy from science, simply impossible as it is, in no way affects the supremacy and sovereignty of revelation, which continues to discharge its own office undiminished in light and power. But such isolation has its effect on the other side. The isolation of faith in the world is the atheism of the world. If the world banishes the Church and the revelation of God from science and from itself, then society is without God, and that is political atheism. If theology be banished from morals, then man is without God. And that is the best definition that I know of heathenism. I know of no axiom surer than this, ' Without God no society,' and for this reason: without God there is no law, and without law society cannot be. If men were to combine together in a society without law to-day, they would be disintegrated and in ruin before sunrise to-morrow. Therefore, with out God there is no political society, no social order, no domestic life, no human society.

5. I may draw another conclusion from the premises I have laid down, namely, that the unity of the faith gives unity to all knowledge. As Lord Bacon said, there is a hierarchy of sciences, but above all there is one, and that one is transcendent, and its jurisdiction is universal and its sovereignty pervades all. The queen of all science is theology or the revelation of God in its scientific form; or in other words, God is in all things, whether it be science or theology. God is the Creator,, and His law pervades all fields of life and light. There is no part of God's works which is not seen in the light of God's presence. All His works are seen in the light of the sun, whether men reflect on it or no; and as it is in the light of the sun that we make our scientific ob servations, so, whether we recognise it or not, all science is in God. All things are in God, and God in all things. In truth, the sunlight of revelation is like the sunlight of the noonday, and I know only two classes of creatures who have any reason to quarrel with it — owls and bats. I do not see what men gain in believing that there is no God. I do not believe that science will be advanced a step by a mere negation. The regenerated reason is lifted above itself, and being elevated by a higher light it has a wider horizon, and within the circuit of that horizon it sees new truths invisible before. By diligent self-culture the man who has two lights can see farther and more widely than the man who has one alone. If he has the light of reason a man may be an Aristotle, a Whewell, or a Tyndall in philosophy; but if he has also the light of faith it is certain that the light of Nature would not be diminished, but the light of the whole man would be doubled. As the Vatican Council declares, and the Holy Father has declared again and again, both philosophers and philosophy are subject to revelation, because God is the fountain of knowledge.

. And now I ask you, what reason has the Church to be afraid of the school? Where was the first school founded? In the house of the bishop. Where did it go next? Into the monastery. Where did it go afterwards but into the university? and who founded the university? Who covered the whole face of the country with the first germs of our grammar schools? Who has been labouring in these last ages, wherever it has not had its hands tied by royal prerogatives or by legislative statutes, to educate the poor? The mother of the poor — the Catholic Church. I believe I only speak your feelings when I say that if the Catholic Church in Eng land had no fear of being ruined except from the school, it would live a long time. I know much more active powers of ruin which seem to be at work. I could find people of all sorts and kinds crying for the banishment of the Jesuits and the priests and the bishops. Even in the letter with which I began we are told that ' in Bavaria the liberality of an enlightened king led to the fatal mistake of confiding the schools of the kingdom to the Doctors of Rome.' I am afraid that there is no comfort for politicians so long as Catholics are allowed equal liberty with Englishmen. As long as they are left to the equal liberty of Englishmen they are in a fair race, and they will be content, and we shall see who will be foremost. The other day I read a remarkable passage from the writings of Mr. Carlyle. He was speaking of the first great French Revolution, which was a mixture of the three things — infidelity, paganism, and blood shed. What do you think he calls it? If I had said it I should have been burned for impiety. He said it was the third and last act of the Protestant Reformation. I do not say that, but I will say that 300 years ago perverted reason attacked faith, and in the last century the Nemesis of Rationalism came to beat down perverted rea son. We have come to a state on which I will add a word or two presently. It ought to make scientific men think twice before they again assail the connection of revelation and faith. We have come to a strange pass. The mental philosophy of the day teaches that the senses are so liable to illusion that we cannot depend upon their reports. If so, the avenues of knowledge are shut up. We are further told that the reason is so liable to illusions arising from the senses that its judgment is not certain. Now God has created man with two chief criteria of knowledge in himself: the senses, whereby he can apprehend the external world; and the reason within him, whereby he passes a simultaneous judgment on the report of his senses. The common sense and common reason of mankind are infallible. Those whose senses misrepresent the objects with which they are in contact are in an abnormal and morbid state, and those who receive the reports of the senses and are not able to reason upon them are of unsound brain. The mental philosophy of the day, therefore, is reducing us to in sanity and to idiotcy. This is verily a Nemesis, and I also will say that this subjective scepticism is indeed the third and last act of the Lutheran Eeformation.

6. Wherefore, lastly, if there be a unity of all know ledge by reason of its consolidation round the unity of faith, I ask, what is the principle of the unity of faith? It is the infallibility of the light of Nature within its own sphere, and the infallibility of the light of faith under the guidance of the Church of God; and where there is that immutable truth as the central light of all, there is also the inflexible tradition whereby the truths of the natural order and the truths of the supernatural order, interwoven together in one whole, are handed down from age to age inviolate. All faith and science, VOL. n. x then, rest upon an indestructible centre, against which the gates of hell shall not prevail.

Let me now apply what I have said to the Academia. It is intended to be a witness to the great truths and laws and methods of which I have spoken, and it is also intended to be a cultivator— that is to say, that the various branches of literature and science will be brought before the members of the Academia for their own cultivation. It is a very humble work. We do not profess to be a school of philosophers, nor a school of scientific men. If we did we should be laughed at, and we should deserve it. The Academia is a very humble and a very homely thing. We do not intend to soar into the empyrean or to melt into the azure. I will tell you what the Academia really is — it is an earthwork. The walls of stone and the bastions of old fortifications are now swept off the face of the earth. They are useless against modern gunnery, but nothing can prevail over an earth work—nothing can tear it to pieces. Well, the Academia will be an earthwork thrown up for the defence of the faith, for the defence of history, and for the examination and analysis of what I was castigated the other day for calling the nursery tales that Englishmen had been reading as histories of the Church. Above all, you will analyse and examine what are called scientific histories. For my part, I believe that there is no such thing. I can understand the term science when it is applied to knowledge which is definite and certain, and can be resolved into its first principles, which are self-evident. This I believe to be the true definition of science. I can also understand science when it signifies such experimental, and therefore such tested, knowledge as the results of chemistry and the like; for though it cannot be resolved into first principles, self-evident in themselves, nevertheless it arrives at ultimate certainty. But when men tell me that a history of the Popes is scientific, because through five hundred pages the Popes are called forgers, deceivers, vicious, covetous, and I know not what besides, when all that can be raked to gether of the garbage and sewage of their enemies in history is collected into a muck heap, as it is within the two boards of one book called Janus — when I am told that this is scientific history, I say that the man who says so does not know what science is, or else, knowing it, is imposing upon his readers. I know what true history is, and what adequate history is. It is history which is true and square to the documents upon which it is founded. But that is not science; and when any man conies and talks to you about scientific history, I advise you as soon as possible to change the subject. I have been reported — I do not know by whom — to have said that the Vatican Council has ' tri umphed over history.' I do not think that I need contradict such a statement; but I will tell you what I did say, have said, and always shall say so long as I have the light of reason: that if there be in the world a Church divinely guided — if there be a Divine Person dwelling in that Church, whose office it is to preserve it from error— then, when that Church has decided, defined, or decreed, any man who appeals from that decision to any human history whatsoever is guilty of rejecting a Divine Teacher, and of the sin of unbelief, of which our Divine Lord said: ' Whosoever believeth and is baptised shall he saved, and whosoever believeth not shall be damned.' I have said that the Vatican Council gave expression to the full revealed and Divine theology of the Church of God upon earth under the guidance of the Holy Ghost, and that therefore the definitions and decrees of the Council are the voice, not of man, but of God; for that reason, whosoever appeals from them to human history commits heresy in appealing from the Divine Teacher, and treason in appealing from the ultimate Sovereign Judge.

7. This evening the Bishop has told you that there are two branches in the Academia. You will have ordinary papers read to you as we have in London, and you will have that which we in London do not possess. You will have a course of lectures on English literature, followed by lectures upon the transit of Venus by one of the highest astronomical authorities; you will have lectures upon the Sacred Scriptures and on scientific subjects, so that the Academia will afford the means of cultivating many branches of knowledge in union with the supreme light of faith. If I may suggest some few subjects for discussion and study, I would recommend the First Constitution of the Vatican Council. I believe there is a special reason why this should be carefully studied by every Catholic. The first chapter is on the existence of God. Strange it may seem that in the nineteenth century it has been necessary for a General Council to declare that the existence of God can by reason be proved. The second chapter is on the nature of revelation, the third on the nature of faith, and the fourth on the relation of faith to reason. Any man making himself master of that one Constitution in ten or fifteen pages will have more than the substance of what I have endeavoured imperfectly to draw in out line. I would also bid you to study the Syllabus, which has caused so great a storm and outcry, and kindled all kinds of animosity. I will venture to say this outcry was raised in nine instances out of ten by those who had never read what they professed to criticise. You may gather from the intensity of opposition it has excited that it is a contradiction of the great cloud of modern errors. It has directed its condemnation to those ten dencies of perverted intellect which at the present moment are making havoc in the regions of truth, from the denial of the very existence of God to the lowest forms of heresy. Again, it will be well to study the bearing of political economy on the morals of the people. I believe that at the present moment political economy and commercial theories and the passion for money are making great havoc in the morals of the people. I would also ask you carefully to examine the application of free trade to drink as a politico-economic question, and also to the labour laws as bearing on the domestic life of our people. I hold this as a primary truth, that when the homes of the people are pure the common wealth is safe; when the homes of the people are wrecked the commonwealth comes down. Next I would mention, merely in passing, the contacts of science and revelation; and lastly, a rigorous appreciation of ' scientific history.'

Therefore, to conclude, it seems to me that the sanctification of the intellect is the proper work of those who have the light of faith, and of men who desire the welfare of their fellows. Every century has had its special aberrations, but those of the early and of the mediaeval ages were moral and spiritual errors in the form of heresy, invented by men who believed in the Christian revelation. But the aberration of the nineteenth century is the intellectual perversion of those who have rejected all revelation, and all belief in a God, and all moral conception of the nature of man. It is to rectify and to restore the intellect of our day from this monstrous and perverse aberration that we are called to labour. I may therefore congratulate the Bishop of Salford that in the city of Manchester, in which, with a vigorous and a fervent authority, he has already welded together the spiritual organisation of the Church, he has successfully founded this intellectual agency, by which the young, perpetually rising from our schools, may receive such culture in literature and science that his flock shall be abreast, at least, with the highest cultivation of this great city.