The Two Worlds, Catholic and Gentile
Brownson's Quarterly Review, April, 1852
Art. II. 1. Encyclical Letter of His Holiness, Pope Pius the Ninth, to the Patriarchs, Primates, Archbishops, and Bishops throughout the World. Rome, at St. John of Lateran. 1850.
2. Letter of the Count de Montalembert to the Catholics of France, on the Presidential Election. Paris. 1851.
3. Acts of the Synod of Thurles. 1.851.
4. Speech of His Grace, the Most Rev. Paul Cullen, Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of all Ireland, at the Opening of the Catholic Defence Association. Dublin. 1851.
5. Speech of the Most Rev. John Hughes, Archbishop of Nero York, at the Astor House Banquet. 1851.
6. Letter of the Rt. Rev. Michael O' Connor, Bishop of Pittsburg, on the Claims of Kossuth. Pittsburg. 1852.
7. The Catholic Press. 1852.
8. Letter from Europe. By Rev. Dr. Baird. New York.
9. Speeches of Kossuth. 1851-52.
10. The Protestant Press, passim. 1852.
It has been said by some who look over our Review, that we are not remarkable for saying new things. Some of our friends have hinted that a little more variety might not be unsuited to our pages, and that it would be likely to secure a class of readers who seldom do us the honor to read our essays. They look at our table of contents, and they lind that the Church, in some one of her aspects, is the centre around which every word and sentence is made to revolve. Our doubting friends ask whether this be politic or necessary. Would it not be well, at times, to suppose, were it but for the sake of argument, that Catholics and Protestants can meet on common, or, at worst, debatable ground ? What principle would be sacrificed, if ah article now and then should appear, in which the Protestant might find some recreation, and some instruction even, without being compelled to stumble over sentences which remind him that his soul is in danger, that he is an inhabitant of a lost world, and that the incomprehensible distance which separates starry bodies most remote from one another is as nothing compared to the abyss which divides the Church, the Catholic world, the Star of Bethlehem, from the world without, the Protestant world, the star that
fell, once upon a time, and dragged after it a third of the lights of heaven? Grant that the Protestant be a fly, cannot you try, at least, to catch him with honey?
Meanwhile, the flies who are to be caught with honey buzz the same complaint in our ears. They cannot open our Review without finding something therein which shocks their sensibilities. Eternal damnation, with all its attendant and unnamable horrors, is forced upon their unwilling attention, as a thing which may be predicated of them, in sensu composite, with the same certainty which enables the by-stander to say of a man who has swallowed deadly poison, and who will not eject it, that he will surely die. Such a course cannot be maintained without innumerable sins against common charity. And why cannot you imitate the policy of our Protestant Reviewers, even of the graver sort, who, if they judge it necessary or expedient to adopt, as their ordinary tone, a heavy, solemn, and religious style of writing, nevertheless interweave flowers and pretty ornaments with their solid matter, and not un-frequently emulate, with no small degree of success, and certainly to the satisfaction of their readers, the light tone and playful manner of the magazine ? Why always harp on the same string ?
We do not mean to institute a comparison, servatis servandis, between ourselves and a Paganini, yet we venture to observe that good music can be drawn from one string. We have frequently answered the objection, that our language involves a breach of common charity, and we will not here repeat our answer. We grant that the objection, as it is here stated, has some color of truth. We do not think much of common charity, inasmuch as it is a counterfeit presentment of an abused name. A little observation is enough to satisfy one that it is the charity of the world, and that in ethics it is called philanthropy ; in theology, indifferentism. True charity, or simply charity, should not be uncommon; but it is, inasmuch as faith is also uncommon. We do not prize the common charity which is rejected by the Church, anathematized by the Apostles, and declared by Christ to be a mere human 3enti-ment, incapable, in any case, of unlocking the gates of heaven. We submit that every word proceeding from the mouth of Christ is honey, and none the less when his words, which were full of sweetness to the penitent, sounded very like a sentence of final reprobation to the proud and obstinate sinner. If our flies mistake the nature of honey, we cannot see that the fault is ours.
But we present nothing new ! The Church, and nothing but the Church, inspires our matins, lauds, and evensong. To these people who ask for a new story we might reply, " Story! God bless you, we have none to tell." The things urged by us have been said before. The Catholic, as often as he has occasion to speak of the world without, finds himself chanting an antiphon that has been familiar, in some form, to every Christian, who must testify against the world, if not in his blood, at least in his tears. The wisdom of Paganism ended with the conclusion that man can know nothing. The wisdom of the Gospel taught Solomon and St. Thomas that man can know only one thing, that God is alpha and omega, the beginning and the end. There is nothing new under the sun, and that which is hath been; that which hath been will be. The saints of every age know that the soul is better than the body; heaven, above the earth; God, the omnipotent master of Satan ; and knowing this thing, they not only know all things worth knowing, but the only thing which can be known at all.
Yet no objection brought against the Christian is more likely to provoke a smile of pity than this which we are now considering, inasmuch as it implies the utter abandonment of right reason on the part of those who make it. We might retort that the world sings but one song, that it knows and can know no other; it is the song sung to it by the Devil in Paradise, which it caught up and has repeated ever since, with a persistence not to be shaken by the discovery, continually made, that it is a lying song. No degree of suffering, no amount of experience, could or can teach ancient or modern heathens that the world is' not a thing to be sought or loved for its own sake. The apple of Sodom never ceases to look inviting to the eye, but the bitter ashes which fill it, and choke the eaters who pass along, furnish no warning or example to the crowds that press from behind, eager to taste and see how bitter Satan is. Were it not a thing of common experience, it would be incredible that the masses of mankind rush blindly to the gulf whence they, as well as Christians, can hear the never-ceasing cry of departed rebels against God, and dupes of the world. " Therefore we have erred ! The harvest is over,,the summer is ended, and we are not saved." Then, if we are reproached with the sameness of onr speech, the answer is prompt. The unity of speech which confesses God includes all truth, and it is the key of heaven. The unity of speech which confesses Satan includes all error, and it is the key of hell.
But, aside from all this, our objector maltreats his own understanding when he complains that Catholic language is one. He acknowledges the intrinsic worthlessness of his own cause. Unity of language implies unity of principle. The gentile, by which term we mean the ancient and modern heathen, the infidel, and the Protestant, finds in the world one language and one speech, proceeding from one principle, which is, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth ? No, say the gentiles, in the beginning the earth created the heavens, and God. Let us build a tower whose top shall pierce the skies. So they set aside the old, God-given unity of language, and found Babylon, the city of the world, the Babel of tongues; and the object of their ambition, the motive of their rebellion, the tower whose top was to reach to heaven, turns out to be a sightless, ruined monument of the folly of its builders, and to reach, not heaven, but hell. The variety of tongues, the diversity of language, for which our gentile asks, may and should be clearly recognized by him as a confusion of speech, utterly wanting unity of principle, referrible to the same causes, and pregnant with the same effects, as the variety of tongues brought upon the dwellers of Babel by their foolish imitation of their master, of the master of all gentiles, of Satan, who before them said, " I will plant my throne above the stars ; I will be like unto the Most High " ; and who, like them, like his eldest earthly son, their father according to the flesh, like Cain, bore upon his brow the sign of damnation, wandered from the face of the Lord, and staggered under a weight of punishment greater than he could bear.
Catholic unity of language implies one principle, one motive, one first and final cause of speech, and as the various parts of any instrument whatever reflect the purpose of the maker, and are intelligible or valuable only as they serve that purpose, so in every sentence of the Catholic speech there appears the principle which informs or vivifies the whole. This principle may be called the glory of God, or his justice, or his kingdom, but it is always God, the Lord of science, who directs thoughts, and puts words into the mouth of his servants. In this sense, the Word of God becomes ilesh in the word of man, because the words of men, naturally presenting the senseless, soulless, unprincipled confusion of Babel, become a word taught by God, repeated by regenerated man after the pattern shown him in the mountain, conserved by, for, and in the Church of Christ through all ages, and declaring, in every word that proceeds from the Christian tongue, that the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth, absolute, universal Master in heaven, on earth, and in hell. It is not denied that this word may be enunciated by the Church, and by her sons, in varied measure, but the burden is still the same, and under all its accidental forms the Christian can readily hear the great word, so often spoken, so little understood, that the soul is more precious than the body ; heaven, than the earth; and that in every thought, word, and action we must seek first the kingdom of God, in which search is found the true, though viewless kingdom of this world, and it is seen to be, not an abiding-place for man, not the beginning or the end of his being, but a land of exile whose natural productions are apples of Sodom, and whose only use is to furnish a causeway to the gates of heaven.
We have the authority of poets and of discontented men for saying that variety is charming. It is true, inasmuch as the human heart is objectively immense, nothing can ±111 it that is not God. The good things of this life may arrest its attention for a moment, but they are not God, and it turns to seek something new, feeling the while a sense of disappointment that grows more keen as the heart grows old, and old without having found God. Aged gentiles are hence miserable, inasmuch as they have never sought God, the true good of their heart, in himself, but they have sought him in his creatures, in which he is never found. They are found in him. Variety ceases to bring pleasure to the old age of a heathen. But it never need bring any thing but contentment to the Christian, who seeks every thing in God, and finds him in every creature. The world, which is such an unfathomable mystery to the unconverted, from the ancient dualists to the modem humanitarians, is to him a book illuminated by the rays of God's countenance; the heavens declare; to him the Divine glory, the firmament displays the infinite creative act; he can understand and repeat the hymns of benediction and praise wherein the royal prophet calls upon even inanimate creatures, from the sun, moon, and stars to lightning, rain, and hail, to bless the Lord, and magnify his name for ever. That summons of the Psalmist king was the best possible answer to the dualist, who pretended that of inanimate beings some were intrinsically evil, eternally turned from good, and incapable of bearing any other than a blaspheming testimony to the Fountain of benediction. It was the best possible answer to the pantheist, inasmuch as it placed the inanimate being in the relation of the creature to its Creator, by imposing upon it the duty of sacrifice. It was the best possible answer to the gentile. He placed the end of his being in creatures. They pointed to God as the sole end of his being, and of theirs, and invited him to seek them in God.
If what is called variety pleases the Christian, his pleasure has nothing in common with that of the heathen. If variety be charming to the gentile, it is so for its own sake; it is so because the possession of a new object brings present weariness, whereupon he seeks in rapidly successive novelty some remedy for the sting which his idols leave behind, as an intimation that, in seeking them as his chief good, he totally mistakes the end of his creation and of theirs, and that every step in their direction removes him eternal ages from God. Multiplicity without unity is chaos, and chaos is the world of the gentile. Not so rolls the Christian world. In it the problem of multiplicity in unity is fully solved. The Christian does not possess the things of this world, he uses them. He finds them in God, and God, the only object which can fill his heart, is found in them. Hence their use brings contentment, their loss imports no sorrow, for God remains when they disappear. And new objects are not sought to stifle disappointment, or to banish satiety, but to find in every creature the means of drawing nearer and yet more near to God. Talk of the lack of variety in Christian life! Why, only in it is variety to be found. Confusion is not variety, yet the world of the gentile is confusion itself, because it is a world of means without an end, effects without a cause, the many without the one. Felix qui potuit return cognosccre causas, exclaimed a genuine heathen, from the depths of his gentile misery. The heathen may-well complain of the sameness of objects in his world, but his weariness cannot be shared by the Christian, whose world is properly a universe, replete with multiplicity, variety, in a supreme and infinite unity. And the Christian language, who but a foolish gentile would discover in it sameness? It is the only living speech, for it is vivified by the Infinite "Word by whom all things were made, and in whom all things live; it is the happy tongue qum rerum potuit cognoseere eausas. Monotony, indeed! Read the writings of the saints, listen to their words, note their ecstasies in the Divine presence, and confess that in the language of the world without you lack words to express things, and lack ideas even to your beggarly words. Let the gentile whose world is barren, who has not even energy to " whistle for want of thought," study men like a holy solitary who began to meditate upon the petitions of the Lord's prayer, but found the words " Our Father " so suggestive, that lie never got beyond them. What does that torrent of ideas mean ? Let him study the interior life of the saints, who find in the contemplation of God a fulness of delight which causes them to exclaim, " O Beauty, ever ancient and ever new! Too late have we known thee; too late have we loved thee! " Why have saints found material for the study of a lifetime in the name of Jesus ? Hear St. Bernard :
" Noc lingua valot diccre, Nee litem uxprimere, Kxpertus potest tlicero Quid sit Jesum diligere ! "
What is seen in these saints may be seen in every Catholic, regard being always had to the degree of goodness by which his Catholic life is measured. Every Catholic has some knowledge of the things about which we have been speaking; good Catholics know more, the saints know most. Through the mercy of God, and without any merits of our own, we find ourselves in the Church, and as the Catholic universe, whose Lord and Master is God, is eternally distinct from the gentile ivorld, whose Lord is also God,"but whose master is Satan, we are constrained to admit that the worst Catholic enjoys advantages which are unknown, although not unsuspected, by the most
praiseworthy heathen. It is not very strange that the gentile, whose ideas are centreless, and whose language is confounded, should see little variety in Catholic speech. Degrees of holiness are degrees of union with God, wherefore the language of the Catholic will bear the more testimony to God, in proportion as he draws nearer to the Divine presence. The oftener he approaches the sacraments, the more frequently will the words, God, Christ, and the Church, fall from his lips. It is natural that the subject of his thoughts should habitually employ his tongue. God has filled his heart with an abundance, and out of that abundance his mouth speaketh. Moreover, the knowledge of divine things enables him to understand the multiplicity of the universe, to apprehend its cause, and to discourse intelligently thereon. But that cause is God in Christ, through the Church. Scientia, said the Roman orator, est cognitio per caasas; and as he was a pagan, he had no science. The Catholic, who is taught to "refer things to their causes, and to do it constantly, cannot, if he be a Catholic, lose sight of God in Christ, through the Church. But to the darkened understanding of the gentile, the Church is a mere human fact, or at least he treats it as if it were, and hence he does not know the endless variety in simplicity, multiplicity in unity, of which only the Church possesses the key. Standing upon the earth at noonday, one can see the sun in the heavens, but nothing else. Let the observer stand near the sun, and he will see all the objects illuminated by that orb. So the gentile, from his opaque world, can see the sun of Catholicity shining in the heavens, but he has no conception of the light in which his earth and other objects appear from the centre of illumination. Hence the Church, a word which is pregnant, for Christians, with a world of ideas, does not give him literally the ghost of a notion. A lifetime of meditation on the words " Our Father," or on the Holy Name of Jesus, is to him an unfathomable mystery. To his mind, our infinitely suggestive Catholic names and words convey little or no meaning. They do not inspire an idea. Poor fool! Like most gentiles, he loves to talk about the fine arts. Did he ever ask himself what it means that the highest efforts of oratory, historical composition, painting, sculpture, architecture, and other arts which he prizes, as the complement of the only civilization he understands, were inspired by the Church, by a prayer, by some influence from a world of which he knows nothing? 'Docs he ever ask himself why artists who warm themselves in the blaze of the nineteenth century are content to copy the excellences of men who lived in the Catholic world, and who prayed, without the faintest hope of ever reaching the excellence of those models ? Or why it is that no deception, in this age of deceptions, is more successful, more highly prized, than a successful imitation of the works of the men who prayed ? It would seem as if one fact, which is constantly recurring in Protestant experience, would lead him to understand the necessity of getting into the Catholic world with all speed. He finds that he can comprehend all forms of heresy, of gentile delusion ; he can comfortably associate with all or any of the votaries of error, and few if any vagaries of theirs seem to him wonderful or strange. Men may deny the Trinity, or aflirm it; believe in the innate depravity of man, or in his essential goodness; maintain the existence of hell, or reject it; admit the existence of God, or doubt whether there be such a Being. He sees no word in the language of any of these, which is not written in his vocabulary, and whose meaning is not satisfactorily ascertained. But when he is thrown into the society of Catholics, he sees something in them passing strange and incomprehensible. He instantly knows that they do not belong to the world which is familiar to him. It is not that he disbelieves their doctrine, because he disbelieves the doctrines of many persons familiar to him in his own world. It is not that he despises them, because he despises many of his own associates. It is not because he thinks them to be ignorant and superstitious, for the place whence he came abounds with ignorant and superstitious people. Then why can he not comprehend the men and things of the Catholic world ? Why is its language to him strange and unintelligible? Is it because Catholicity is nonsensical, beneath his understanding? No, for he would then see through it, as he does through any thing absurd and foolish which he meets in some men and things of his own world. Moreover, he knows that the genius and learning of ages was inspired and fostered by this incomprehensible religion. He every day sees men of exalted natural attainments leaving his world in disgust, and embracing Catholicity. Works of art, which he knows cannot be equalled in his world, were thrown off in the Catholic universe with an ease and rapidity which make him almost think that Catholic artists made a pastime of what costs him a lifetime of toil.
And he is conscious of another mystery. The men of his gentile world, with whom he lives, are not to him special objects of love or of hatred, apart from any good or evil they may have done to his person. Friendship to few, good-will, or at least indifference, towards all others, is a rule which he seldom finds it difficult to observe in his world, unless where his real or supposed enemies are concerned. But the presence of a Catholic, certainly of a Catholic priest, causes in him a feeling of distrust, of antipathy, of incipient, and not unfrequently of burning hatred. He knows that these feelings are shared by all true gentiles of every age; he has a secret notion that they must be, and he feels himself urged, and sometimes quite prepared, to do Catholics an injury. If he can persecute, he will. If he cannot by law, he contents himself with urging its necessity, and in the mean time with annoying them in all ways within the law. Now why do these feelings towards men who have never offended him, and who would serve him, arise in the heart of a true gentile. That they do arise is certain; and the halls of legislation, the courts, the schools, the workshops, the kitchens, even here in Boston, bear witness that they do. He cannot tell. His distrust, uneasiness, or hatred is to him as incomprehensible, when he tries to account for it, as is his utter failure to comprehend Catholic language and ways. He sometimes endeavors to justify himself by saying that, in other countries, Catholics, long since dead, worked some evil to Protestantism, and he also imputes to Catholics doctrines and practices which they anathematize and abhor. Yet he knows in his secret soul that these accusations are false, or at least of doubtful truth, and he is also aware that, even if they were true, his contented toleration of worse evils in his own world takes from him his excuse for persecuting Catholics.
Then what is the secret of his utter inability to comprehend any thing appertaining to Catholicity, and his hatred to its name? He cannot tell. If he would plead ignorance, and put himself in the category of those who take omne ignohim pro magnifeco, there would be a hope for him, because his pride, the chief if not the only obstacle to conversion, to a translation to the Catholic universe, would receive a smart blow from that confession. But such a course would be inadmissible, for the men of his world are enlightened in their generation; they have harnessed the lightning, they have annihilated space; there is no power in nature which they have not chained, or do not hope to chain ; there is no secret in nature which they do not understand, or think that they understand, or at least expect to master. Then this Catholicity at which they so hopelessly stare is not within the range of natural things. Then it is above nature, it belongs to a higher world, and the things peculiar to it are of course, and naturally, above the comprehensions of men who live in a lower world, in the gentile chaos. And this is the reason why Catholicity is and must be eternally incomprehensible to the natural man. It is scarcely worth while to notice the objection made by bigoted Protestants, who fancy that they are religious persons. They share the feelings just described; the Church is to them unintelligible and hateful in a supreme degree. Their anger and wonder are especially aroused by the fact, that no conspiracy against the Church, organized these eighteen centuries, has produced any other result than the ruin of her enemies, an unexpected and effective display of her own resources, and the occupation by her of a position higher, firmer, than that which she apparently held when they began the attack. No vessel ever encountered surer destruction in running upon rocks, than have the kings and kingdoms that sought to crush her. The spiritual children of Pius the Ninth have heard, as Christians of every age have heard, the voice of an angel coming to them in their Egyptian banishment, and saying, " Arise, and return, for they are dead that sought the life of the child." How many times have they rolled stones to the door of her sepulchre, sealed it, placed soldiers to watch it, and then went their way to make merry over the fallen Church, at the very moment when she was putting aside the stones, paralyzing the soldiers, and showing herself to the people as the Bride of Christ, beautiful as the moon, royal as the sun, terrible as an army in battle array! Let her visit, as she has visited, the valley of dry bones, the remnants of fallen empires, the ghosts of a mined civilization, and presently the ghosts vanish, the dry bones live, new kingdoms appear.
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Now the bigoted gentile, who fancies that he is religious, not seldom admits that the things of the Catholic world are incomprehensible to him and his fellows, and that they are not the results of natural causes. Therefore he argues that the Catholic Church is a device of Satan, and sometimes he tries to believe that it is. Catholics need not be disturbed at the accusation ; it was also preferred by the bigoted gentiles against our Lord Jesus Christ: "He casteth out devils through Beelzebub, the prince of devils." " He is a Samaritan, and he hath a devil." The answer of our Lord will serve as an answer to the modern Pharisee : " A house divided against itself cannot stand." The Church of Christ stands yet. She continually wars against devils,--casts them out; then she has no league with them. Her works are those which the Devil cannot endure, neither can his servants of the gentile world. What he hates, she loves, and what he seeks, she spurns. Moreover, our bigoted Protestant, who fancies that the Church is a device of Satan, has two or three awkward difficulties awaiting solution. In all ages, the great mass of the men who actively sought the destruction of the Church were confessedly servants of the Devil, inasmuch as they were atheists, enemies of all religion, and therefore, in the eyes even of Protestants, limbs of Satan. The horde of European revolutionists is an instance in point. Then the gentile admits that the Church is incomprehensible, and, somehow, invincible. Now the Devil is a shallow creature, easily seen through, readily detected in even the most astute of his wiles, as the Holy Scriptures abundantly testify. And he is a coward; he flies from the man who resists him. Moreover, when our gentile, admitting that Catholicity is supernatural, surmises that the Devil fashioned it, he commits a serious blunder. The Devil is not a being in the supernatural world; he is ordinarily invisible, it is true, but only gentile philosophers confound the invisible with the supernatural The Devil is a fallen being, and he is in the order of ungraccd nature. Hence our gentile, in admitting that the Church does not belong to the natural world, grants also that the Devil has no part in founding it. And only a little of the intelligence which is said to illuminate this age would suffice to show the gentile that his very world is the theatre especially taken by the Devil, under Divine permission, for the scene of his infernal labors, and that his very world is characterized by the mass of Protestant preachers as the Devil's especial ground. Therein they are right.
The discovery, or perhaps we should say the revival, of the application of algebra to mathematical and other kindred calculations, was received by the learned as a great addition to the instruments of science, and with reason, since the terms of an equation are universal, embrace any possible number of particular quantities. The formula represents all and each, and solves any quantitative problem connected with any of them, while it is indifferent to their non-quantitative specialities, and stands to them severally as the universal does to the particular. The Catholic dogma stands in a similar relation to all and each of the things of the universe. It is generative, moreover, which is an attribute only of the Living Universal. Herein is a peg whereon to hang a remark apposite to our subject. The algebraic formula, the generic statement, is use-iul as a proposition to which any number of particulars may be reduced. It may stand for any of them, and solve any question about them connected with any predicate which is common to all of them. It can do no more. Propositions, particular statements, may be reduced to it, not one can be educed from it. It is not fecund. The Catholic dogma is living, living in the Church, living in Christ; and it ^generative, because it has life. Its life is the grace of Christ. So there is no question, no problem of the universe, which may not be reduced to it. It solves all and each. And there is no conclusion or proposition affecting the life of man which may not be educed from it. The Church tells you what is and what is not, what must or must not be done. Through her, strength is given to believe and to do; to make the conclusion educed from her live in the moral world, live in human acts. God is the Living Universal, and only he can be; but the grace of Christ is the life of the Church, and that grace, inasmuch as it is^Light and Love, is the Holy Ghost; wherefore it is said, Ecclesia est Spiritus Sanctus; and this grace, this life of the Church, makes her creatrix of the moral, the Catholic world, wherefore; she is a living universal. And so every human act, to be meritorious of eternal life, to have a place in the moral, supernatural, Catholic world, must be informed through her, and live her life. A man must have her for his Mother, or he cannot have God for his Father. And as there is no object which may not be affected by human acts, or which may not affect them, and as none of these have a place in the Catholic, supernatural world unless they are informed, directed, vivified, by the Church, it is clear that there is nothing in the universe which is not subject to Catholic dogma. Every thing that exists may be made an occasion of sin or of well-doing, of damnation or of salvation. The Church, in which alone damnation is avoided and salvation obtained, and which directs with infallible certainty, and strengthens with certain, though unmerited grace, every human act in the supernatural world, gives us the means of avoiding the one and of obtaining the other. Wherefore the dominion of the Church is imperial and universal. Every thing that exists in the world stands in a relation either conducive or adverse to salvation. The Church knows and tells us with infallible certainty what that relation is, and our thoughts and acts with reference to the things of the universe are shaped accordingly. Inasmuch as God is better than the world, heaven than hell, the soul than the body, the supernatural than the gentile world, so, when an object is adverse to God, to heaven, and to the soul, while favorable to the other alternatives, that object is bad, and it is to be eschewed ; otherwise it is good, and to be sought and referred to God.
From all this follows a conclusion easily drawn. Every thing that exists in the world stands in one aspect to the Catholic, and in a contrary aspect to the Protestant or gentile. The Catholic we mean, of course, the true Catholic refers everything to God, nothing to himself or to the world. Concerning every thing, he asks, Is it good for God, for heaven, and for the soul? If so, it is to be prized; if not, it is worse than worthless. It is possible, nay, it is quite probable, that some Protestants may assent, in theory, to this view, and that it may even be inculcated from pulpits ; but the Protestant world denies it in theory and in practice, which is a sufficient reason why Protestant sermons are disregarded, in addition to the fact that Protestant ministers were not sent to preach. The sermons, when they happen to be partially orthodox, are disregarded because they are unintelligible. They are unintelligible because they are in opposition to
the principles of the Protestant world, and are therefore propositions drawn from no principle and asserted on no authority. Drawn from no principle, because they can and do (low only from the Catholic dogma, of which the Protestant world knows nothing. Asserted on no authority, for the minister has none of his own ; he knows not the Church, and he is not sent to preach. That some scattered propositions deduced from Catholic dogma are admitted in theory by some Protestants, and inculcated from pulpits, is not wonderful. Human nature is not essentially corrupt. The understanding was darkened by the Fall, but it was not destroyed. The will was weakened, but it was not spent. Some of the truths of what is sometimes called natural theology and ethics, but which we prefer to call a portion of the primitive revelation given with language to the first man, can be discerned by us, even in a fallen state. Some of the more facile duties of the moral law can be done by fallen man. Pure error or evil in a proposition, or in a human act, is intrinsically impossible. The gentile world, although it is destitute of faith, hope, and charity, is not wholly destitute of grace. It knows nothing of habitual, sanctifying grace, which some theologians call the grace of Christ in a more especial sense, inasmuch as it crowns in the living man the work of redemption ; but the gentile need not be a stranger to that grace which is sometimes called the grace of God, by way of intimation, we suppose, that the grace bestowed upon him may be said to be, to a certain extent, the grace of God the Creator rather than that of God the Redeemer. He can discover some truths, do some naturally good works, cooperate with Divine grace from step to step, until he pass into the Church, into the supernatural world, and become the subject of the grace of Christ, in its full acceptation. God is willing, God denies no necessary graces, and Christ, in dying, offered him the means. As there are degrees of sanctity among Christians, so there are degrees of unbelief and of wickedness among gentiles. It is true that they are all equally removed, in sensu composite, from heaven, because all are shut out. But in any other sense it is not true that they are in the same predicament. They who perish farthest from the shore sink in the deepest water. It is not surprising, then, that some gentiles assent to more conclusions drawn from the Catholic dogma, and live more regular lives, than others do. Nature, although it cannot do every thing, cannot gain heaven, yet, is not absolutely good for nothing. Finally, the assent of some Protestants to certain detached Catholic conclusions indicates that they have preserved a remnant, or at least a reminiscence, of Catholicity from the wreck of the sixteenth century. Besides, the Church is; every man may see her; she sits upon a mountain, and her light is not hid. And Protestantism is not a negative, but a privative. Every privative presupposes a positive, and cannot be without it.
Now these things show that Catholics and gentiles live in two eternally distinct worlds, and they indicate how and why. The* Catholic refers every thing to God, and regards nothing as good which does not come from God, and end in him. The gentile refers every thing to this world or to himself, and regards nothing as good which does not end in himself. The gentile never thinks it necessary to subordinate and refer his own being to God as his final end. Even when he admits that there is an hereafter and a heaven, he thinks that he will go to heaven, as a thing of course, inasmuch as a destiny which will bring permanent misery upon himself is a case quite out of the course of events in his world. And when he says that he will go to heaven, he does not mean that he will go to render glory to God, but to bring happiness to himself. God and heaven are only for his sake. So even heaven, the centre of God's presence, he subordinates to himself.
It is difficult to conceive two worlds more opposed, more irreconcilable, than these. One is the causeway to heaven, the other the antechamber of hell, and heaven and hell each casts its light or its shadow upon its own world, and colors it accordingly. If the opposition between the Catholic and the gentile were visible only on Sundays, outside the walls of the church, or on stated occasions, it would not be so singular. But there is not a moment in which it may not become evident. There is not an action in which it may not appear. There is not a thing, however indifferent in itself, which may not be an occasion for its manifestation. Say that a man eats. If he be a gen-tile^he will eat simply to satisfy his appetite. If he be a Christian, with a sign of the cross he refers his eating to the glory of God. The two men have placed the action in two distinct worlds. How ? The gentile cats simply for the sake of eating; more accurately, to gratify himself. The action is not done for God, and God has no part; in it. It is then an act done in the world in which God is not master. The final end of the action is the satisfaction of the eater. God is defrauded of the glory due to him. GJlory, from the mere act of eating ? Yes, glory. He has willed that every thing we do must be done for him. And before him there are no such things as great and little. The universe is as a grain of sand. Alexander eating is as Alexander conquering the world. We make the distinction between great and little because we are little. They are alike before God, because he is great. Are not the actions of what we call little men alike to the men whom we call great? Therefore glory is not given to God; a sin has been committed, and it will be remembered and punished at the last day. The Christian, on the contrary, places the action in the world in which God is master. Two worlds, one its own end, the other a simple means ; one with Satan for its master, the other with God for its master ; one in which God has no part, the other in which Satan has no portion; one in which every thing glorifies God, the other in which every thing glorifies man, are two sufficiently distinct worlds. The soul was made for God, the body for the soul, eating for the body ; therefore eating is an act to be necessarily subordinated to God, and when it is not, it loses its signification, its end, its place in the universe. Logicians say that the sorites is the most difficult to manage; of all forms of reasoning. Yet the Catholic makes a sorites like the above every day, every hour, and with infallible accuracy, for his argument begins and ends with God. This habit of close reasoning, based upon the science of final causes, the most recondite of all sciences to the gentile, the most easy to the Catholic, indicates that the Christian must be an excellent logician, and so he is. It proves more. All science is based upon the science of final causes; more accurately, of the Final Cause. The gentile knows nothing of this science. Then he knows no science. Science est cognilio rcriim per can-sas. Causam, Cicero should have said, as in effect he did in his last moments, when he exclaimed, Causa causa-rum, miserere mei! So the gentile is a very unscientific person, while the knowledge he lacks is obtained from the
Catechism, and is known even to Catholic children. This is the demonstration of a proposition of ours which has seemed strange to some, in which we said that the Catholic child who knows his Catechism knows more than the most learned Protestant.
The man who knows the final cause of things knows the first cause, and he is, in despite of himself, an ontologist. Every Catholic is an ontologist, he cannot help it; and if he chance to affect psychology, it is owing to accidental circumstances, such as a wrong direction given to his early studies, the choice of a text-book, the influence of a favorite professor, or an analytical turn of mind. But he forgets his psychology in grave matters. All Catholics untainted by secular education are ontologists. It cannot be otherwise ; for ontology is the science of beings, therefore of forces, therefore of causes. The Catholic learns this from his Catechism, and applies it to his life. Ontology deals with the creation of secondary causes, in the first cycle, and their return to God the Creator, in the second cycle; the Catechism deals with the same thing, and so does the Catholic, continually. The sign of the cross, made by him over his meat, is a sign of his ontology, and a summing up, eminenter, of the science itself. A Protestant cannot be an ontologist, therefore. And hence it is matter of history that no Protestant ever was an ontologist. Certain chapters of history can be written a priori. Protestant metaphysics, being destitute of principles, because barren of all knowledge concerning final causes, sink into materialism. Hence the Protestant predilection for what are miscalled natural sciences. That predilection is instinctive. Those so-called sciences utterly ignore the science of causes, the first and the final; so they are a congeries of effects without causes ; therefore they are the science of effects which are not effects. Any manual of natural science, so called, exhibits this result, The science turns out to be an imperfect, and often arbitrary, classification of objects, which is changed to suit the whims of each succeeding professor, so that one need not live a long life to find himself constrained to study half a dozen sciences of the same class of objects, each contradicting the others. And so the Protestant science of logic degrades the syllogism, a cunning manoeuvre, destroying, at a blow, the instruments of reasoning; and it makes of universal ideas mere names. It was appropriately done, for ideas imply causes; names indicate things, without any reference to causes. Protestant metaphysics are an excellent handmaid to Protestant theology ; in the former, we have the science of effects without causes; in the latter, the science of a world without a God.
The opposition between the two worlds, gentile and Christian, is necessarily visible or imminent iu every thing. We selected eating as an example, but the same thing is universally evident. What can God have to do with my vote ? Just as much as with every thing else. God is the author of society. He placed man in it, in order that he might the more readily obtain means whereby to glorify his Creator by saving his soul; government is necessary to society ; government should be administered in truth and in justice, and your vote decides whether good men shall so administer it, or whether bad men shall pervert it; your vote decides whether society shall be an instrument for the salvation or the damnation of men, whether it shall glorify God's mercy or his justice. God will be glorified in any case, and the only question is, whether you are to be his mere instrument, to be used and thrown aside in hell, or a co-worker, to be summoned, after a lifetime of faithful cooperation, into the joy of your Lord.
To the gentile, riches are his, poverty is a crime, sickness a curse, misfortune undeserved, enemies hateful, disgrace inexplicable, the world good, the flesh to be indulged, man illimitably progressive, and death a sovereign calamity. To the Christian all these propositions are reversed. Riches belong to God, poverty is a virtue, sickness may be a mercy, misfortune a blessing, enemies are to be loved, disgrace is an occasion of repentance and of merit, the world evil, the flesh to be repressed, man fallen, death a release. In every thing the same antagonism is visible, although its appearance, universal as it is, never fails to make the gentile wonder; another proof that the gentile is essentially unintellectual, and that he is an inductive philosopher. An examination of each case of antagonism will furnish the same result, and indicate the root of the evil, the cause of this irreconcilable difference between the two worlds. The Christian seeks God in every thing, the gentile seeks himself. This error of the gentile, by the way, could not fail to produce idolatry; indeed, it is idolatry; and accordingly the worship of the creature, its substitution for the Creator, is a very old fact, as predicable, however, of the gentile today as ever it was. Whoever reflects upon the great apostasy of the world from God to itself, will understand why idolatry made its appearance so early, why it is that our age is eminently idolatrous, and that creature-worship will never pass away.
Not unfrequently this never-ending antagonism between the Catholic and the Protestant view of men and of things excites the most marked attention in every quarter, and it is when the thing in question occupies a large space in the public eye. Kossuth and Louis Napoleon are prominent examples in point. It is pretty generally agreed that Catholics oppose Kossuth and uphold Louis Napoleon, while Protestants uphold Kossuth and oppose the French President. And this fact astonishes many persons as if it were a new thing. It is not new or surprising to Catholics, inasmuch as their judgment concerning these two individuals is a mere application to new cases of principles with which they are familiar, and which they are called upon daily to apply to men and to things. The magnitude of the interests at stake do not, for their own sake, move the Catholic, hasten his judgment, or retard it, It is as easy to judge a great as a small matter, for the Catholic dogma is as applicable to one as it is to the other, and moreover, in its presence, great and small affairs of this world are alike.
With reference to Louis Napoleon, the question before the Catholic is, what bearing the recent events in France have upon the kingdom of God upon earth. Whatever ambitious projects the President may cherish, whatever his motives may have been, whatever may be his personal standing in the sight of God, are questions foreign to the cause which is to be adjudicated before the two worlds. Granting his motives to be good, his enemies will not take them into account, or admit them as an excuse for what he has done. We have nothing to do with them; we have simply to weigh the acts which have been done in the presence of the world, leaving all adjudication of motives to Him who alone can judge them. If the heart of the President be right in the sight of God, it will be well for himselt'; if not, God will accept what he has done, press it into the accomplishment of his designs, and cause the President to go the way of mere human instruments of his will. Yet, when the act is good, it is but fair to infer that the motive is also good, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, and we have yet to see proof that Louis Napoleon was not sincere. Meanwhile, the work done by him has been good. He preserved the independence of the Holy See, the centre of Catholic unity. What is called the temporal power of the Pope may not be essei> tial to his office, but the history of the last thousand years gives evidence enough that it is the will of God that the Pope should retain that temporal power. He has lost it several times, and it has always been restored to him in a wonderful way. The last restoration, in 1849, is an event which has to this day exercised the wits of gentiles, who cannot comprehend it because the providence of God is in their world an empty sound. And God has manifested his providence, not only by always restoring the Pope in some strange, out-of-the-way manner, which no one, no gentile certainly, would have anticipated, but also by punishing the enemies of the Holy See. History has yet to say that a Roman republican came to a good end. The enemies of the Papal crown were always the enemies of the Papal mitre. Louis Napoleon, in driving them from Home, gave the anti-Catholic world a blow which shook it to its centre. He has also served the interests of religion in France by securing to the Church in that country a freedom which it has not known for centuries; by promoting the interests of religious education, and in other ways which it is not necessary to recount. Government is essential to the well-being of society; the President found his country torn by factions, on the eve of a reign of terror, terror, not to the wicked, but to the good, and he inaugurated government, a thing almost unknown, hopeless, forgotten, in France. He has silenced the Socialists, the enemies of the Church, and, in an especial manner, of the Christian family. He has preserved, for the present, the peace of Europe, inasmuch as his unexpected and providential act has damped, if not destroyed, the hopes of the revolutionists. Now the question before the Catholic is this. What relation has the work done by L ouis Napoleon to the soul, to heaven, to the supernatural world ? F'rom the enumeration of his acts, it results that they tend to the defence of the Church, of the family, of government, and of society. The men protected by him are generally Catholics, persons who regard the world as subordinate to God. The men repressed by him are generally gentiles, persons who subordinate the world to human passions. The things encouraged by him are prized by Christians; the things destroyed by him are not lawful for Christians to love. It is easy to anticipate and to understand the unanimity of the Catholic judgment regarding Louis Napoleon. The work done by him is good for the kingdom of God.
Now the gentile encounters here his usual difficulty in comprehending the Catholic judgment. It is based upon the principle that what is sinful is not good for the state. This is the Gospel which sounds like foolishness to him; for God, heaven, the Church, and the soul have no voice in politics in the world which possesses him. His model statesmen laugh at the notion that they should do or undo any thing for the sake of the soul. A member of Parliament, or of Congress, who might defend or oppose any measure on this ground, would be hissed out of countenance. The gentile denounces Louis Napoleon, because the work done by him is not good for the body, for the world. The President, he says, has trampled upon the freedom and rights of Frenchmen. Men are entitled to the largest liberty of thought, speech, and action. Human nature is perfect or perfectible j its tendencies are innocent, they perfect it, therefore men have the right to follow its tendencies. Any action is just which tends to make man free in every thing. The people are sovereign, therefore they may elect to have any or no government. If they do not like the Church; if they kill or banish priests, and turn the churches into playhouses or stables ; if they assassinate in cold blood every man who is likely to embarrass them by his fidelity to God or to the state; if they promote godless education ; if they plot against the integrity of the family ; if they organize midnight conspiracies against the state, thereby filling peaceable men with alarm ; if they circulate licentious writings in all imaginable shapes, they only exercise the freedom essential to the development of human nature. The people never make mistakes. That government is the best which governs the least, and Louis Napoleon has retarded the time when all government will become unnecessary to a self-regulating people; he has fastened chains upon human nature ; his work is therefore bad.
The two conflicting judgments were to be expected, for the principles of the parties are utterly irreconcilable. This is forbidden by the law of God, says the Catholic, therefore it is not good for the country. This tends to free the people from all law, says the Protestant, therefore it is good lor the country. No wonder that the Catholic and the Protestant stare at one another, when they talk of recent political events.
The case of Kossuth presents no special difficulty. The Catholic judgment is unpopular, but that is nothing new. When Kossuth landed in England, he ceased to be the hero of a tale of Eastern crime, and in declaring England to be his book of life, he avowed his ambition to be the hero of the Western world of villany. True to his world, he appeals to our mob against the government; seeks to entangle us in an unjust, as well as foolish, war against nations that have done us no harm ; reviles all that is respectable in the counsels and traditions left by the founders of our republic, and adds his influence to the forces which are expedited for the downfall of our national greatness. Considering the immense number of persons who have been led astray by him, who have committed and will commit the most atrocious crimes against Heaven, the Church, and society, in consequence of his evil example, considering the thousands who have lost and will lose their lives because of him, it is lawful to conclude that no man of our day has caused more misery, more sin, or has precipitated more souls into hell. We have heretofore shown that his Magyar cause was unworthy the support of an honest man. The atrocious murder of the venerable men, Lambert and La tour; the theft of the property of Hungary ; the saddling his country, already ruined by domestic and foreign wars of his creation, with an immense debt, for which he left only notes and promises ; the false pretences under which he is now filching more money from silly people, and burdening his country, whose credit he has as little right to pledge as he has to pledge that of America, with a new debt, are only a tithe of the misdeeds for which he will yet stand adjudged guilty before outraged Europe. He is pledged to destroy the supremacy of the Pope, and to uproot, if possible, the Catholic Church in Europe. He is the friend and ally of the enemies of religion, government, the family, and society, whom Louis Napoleon has succeeded, for the present, in whipping back to their kennels. Not satisfied with the piles of dead bodies heaped together by his insane lust for power and for revenge, he is "even now devising the murder of untold thousands. He is pledged to ruin Austria, and one of his avowed reasons is, that the Catholic governments may fall with her ; that the demons of rape, murder, and robbery may be let loose upon Europe ; that the Church, and all those holy and useful institutions which depend upon the Church, may be totally swept away. He is the preacher of revolution for its own sake. The modern revolutionary doctrine, of which he is a champion, is condemned by right reason, and anathematized by the Church, which repeats the words of St. Paul, and enforces the law of God, denouncing eternal damnation to those miserable men who, without just and weighty causes, known as such to the world, and declared to be such by competent authority, refuse obedience to their legitimate rulers. No Catholic is or can be a Red Republican or Socialist. The revolutionists themselves are a small minority of the people. They are cowards, moreover ; they plot and fight only in the dark, and Louis Napoleon has shown that one man, with sufficient resolution and willingness to expose his life to the constant peril of assassination, is strong enough to drive them all back to their burrows. When they succeed, the people begin to know what despotism means. And after loading the people with untold miseries ; after laying waste the country with fire and sword; after destroying, in a year, the fruits of the piety and the industry of ages; after the commission of crimes which recall the memory of barbarous times; after filling their purses with gold stolen from the altar and the poor, they run to a hiding-place, to some nest for swarming vipers, like England, and plot in the dark for fresh horrors to Europe, already thrown by them, and by such as they, into the barbarism of pagan ages. These are the works of Kossuth, and Catholics, trying his conduct by the law of God, cannot see in him any other than the enemy of souls.
But how the gentile laughs at that accusation ! He admits that Kossuth and his friends have done these things, but in his world these things go under other names. War against the Church is war against unmanly superstition ; godless education is freedom to the mind; the damnable license of writers is the freedom of the press ; midnight conspiracies are patriotic councils ; assassination is Ihe immolation of a tyrant or of a slave upon the altar of liberty ; theft is a loan for the public welfare; wholesale murder is the just retribution awaiting the tools of despotism ; Kossuth is the apostle at whose voice tyrants quake, and chains fall from the limbs of oppressed nations. He is the hero of the divine fury which arouses humanity; he is the champion of universal liberty ; he is the high-priest of the PEOPLE-GOD.
The Catholic dogma, the formula of endless variety in supreme unity, contains the solution of every question, the particular formula for every action, the meaning of every thing which exists, and the right name for every object in the universe. It is the generative formula of the True, the Good, and the .Beautiful in the moral world. It is therefore easy to conceive that there never was a time when it was not invoked by Christians for their guidance, and that its appearance in history is a constantly recurring fact. Theologians say that there are four marks by which the Church may be known. There are four marks by which the gentile may be known. These are ignorance, unbelief, hatred, and scorn. The gentile cannot understand Catholic doctrine; he will not believe it; he hates it, he scorns it. Our Lord Jesus Christ, who taught us every lesson worth knowing, taught us this lesson also: "He came unto his own, and his own received him not." The people could not or would not understand his language, or the principles of his Gospel. Seek first only the world, said they. Seek first only God, he answered. This was as incomprehensible to them as it is to the gentile now. No amount of experience can teach the gentile ; his heart is hardened, and, like Pharaoh, he sutlers great calamities without any profit to his soul, inasmuch as he attributes these calamities to the Fates, to chance, to the air, to magicians, to any hand but that of God. Whom he chas-tiseth he loveth. But the Pharaohs of every age lose the benefit of chastisement; their hearts are hardened, they return with hatred the love of God. Our Lord spoke of this matter frequently with his disciples, and it happened more than once that when he preached to the people his disciples did not understand him, for they, like some worldly Catholics of our own day, were not enlightened by the Holy Ghost. Our Lord told his disciples he knew that the people did not understand his words. " To you," he said, "it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God ; to the rest I speak in parables, that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not hear." He told the people that he was a king. They raised the cry of treason. What people now say of the Pope was then said of Christ; his spiritual authority would lead him to grasp temporal honors, and to teach the people disloyalty to the kings and presidents of that day. His Apostles encountered the same treatment; they were looked upon as men belonging to another world, and speaking another language; they were adjudged public enemies, and as such they were doomed to die. For three hundred years, and more, the Christians' road to heaven was red with their own blood. Their pure lives, their submission to the authorities, their loyalty, brought them no mitigation of their sufferings ; for they obeyed man only for the love of God, and no breach of the commandments of the world is less readily forgiven by it than the violation of that which calls upon men to love the world first, last, and alone. The early Christians, like Christ and the Apostles, were accused of plotting to upset the state. It seemed to the people impossible/that men united in a compact body, having one law, one doctrine, one God, one visible chief, one method of talking and of acting, and who had been treated so cruelly by government and people, could possibly be loyal citizens. The words of the prophet, quoted by Christ as applicable to the people who stood near him, wondering what he meant, are just as applicable to the gentile world of every age: " For the heart of this people has grown gross, and with their ears they have been dull of hearing, and their eyes they have shut, lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and be converted, and I should heal them." St. Paul, when he preached to the Jews, at Rome and elsewhere, and when he saw how blind, deaf, and dumb they were, could not refrain from marvelling at them. Learning made no difference in the hearers, or rather, as happens in our own day, a thorough secular education seemed to make the hearers more stupid and more incapable of understanding the Gospel. Such men employ their learning to invent obstacles and reasons why they should not believe in the Church. In the time of St. Paul, the philosophers of Athens were the most accomplished gentlemen in the world. Yet he found them an uncommonly stupid set of men, more incapable than the unlettered crowd of comprehending the Christian doctrine. He, like his Master, like all Catholics, had to meet the never-failing accusation of disloyalty to the state, a circumstance which proves, if proof were wanting, that good Christians were always good Papists, inasmuch as the Roman centre of unity was and is the main cause of that accusation. When St. Paul was at Philippi, he was imprisoned and whipped for a cause which is always recited in the acts of indictment against the Christian, for teaching fashions which it was not lawful for the Romans to observe. So, when the struggle between the Church and the emperors of Germany, concerning investitures, was going on, the misunderstanding was as great as ever. The Holy Ghost sends bishops to rule the Church of God, the bishops send priests to preach, and to administer the Sacraments. But this doctrine, which centres all in God, was incomprehensible to men who made every thing centre in the world, that is, in themselves. The emperors could see in a bishop only an efficient police marshal, and in a priest an active constable. So the emperors insisted that it was their right to give the ring and crosier, the emblems of authority, to the bishops. This was a subordination of the soul to the body, heaven to earth, God to man, and the Church could not, of course, permit such a practice to be enforced. So in France, when the Church insisted upon her own independence, or upon the abandonment, on the part of a married king, of some woman whom he had taken to the place of his wife, the gentile kings and people accused the Pope of interference in temporal affairs. So in England, when the Church resisted the absurd pretensions of Henry the Second, the tyranny of John, and the licentiousness of Henry the Eighth, all of whom strove to make the Church in England an Anglican sect, the gentile kings and people were enraged, and, not heeding that the Lord who sitteth in the heavens laughed them to scorn, imagined a vain thing; and no subsequent lesson has induced them to abandon their contest with God, and with his Christ. Pretending that Catholics were disloyal to the state, they have ever since persecuted them, and the very last year saw Queen, Lords, and Commons persisting to imagine a vain thing. The silly law concerning titles is precisely the same in principle with hundreds of laws passed in different countries, during the last eighteen hundred years, by gentiles who have eyes and sec not, and they serve to prove that no amount of human knowledge will enable a man to comprehend the first principles of the Catechism, or to understand a sentence uttered by a Catholic concerning religious things. This omnipresent fact is within the experience of every Catholic. It is seen as often as a Catholic becomes a candidate for the humblest ollice, enters a common school, opens a store, labors in a kitchen, or in any way comes into contact with Protestants. Misunderstanding of the most radical stamp, of the most hopeless character, awaits the Catholic in every quarter, and the burden of the Protestant or gentile complaint, however diverse in form, is always found to be the same in substance ; the Catholic is disloyal to the world ; he seeks first the kingdom of God, and his everlasting justice. The gentile accusation is true. Catholics glory in their disloyalty to his world, inasmuch as loyalty to it is disloyalty to God.
See what profane history has to say of your saints. What nice instinct selected that word, profane, and secular ! It is always blasphemous, for its material includes only those things which are outside the temple, the Church; which are unconsecrated, and which belong, accordingly, to the secular world, which is a world of mere facts, effects without causes, causes, that is, known to itself. See what this history has to say of wicked men. Their actions fill every page. Whereas saints like Francis, Dominic, Ignatius, Gregory the Seventh, Innocent the Third, Pius the Fifth, Thomas a Becket, Catherine, Theresa, and others, are dismissed with an indignant or sneering paragraph, in which the world is informed that these saints, in whose honor the Church erects temples to Almighty God, were fanatical, arrogant, haughty, superstitious men and women. The history which writes down Christ as a malefactor, spares no abuse of his saints.
Before we close this article, we wish to call attention to two facts connected with our subject. We may return to each hereafter; we dismiss them here with a paragraph. The instrument used against its nature is spoiled, and the work on which it is used is ruined. The world is com-polled, as the Devil was before Christ, to testify against itself, and accordingly in every age the ruin of gentile handiwork teaches every one, excepting the blind and deaf worker, that the world is an instrument whose only use is to furnish a causeway to heaven. The personal enemies of Christ were doomed, even during their lives, and the holy city became a ruin, not one stone remained upon another. The cities which rejected the Apostles have followed Jerusalem, at no great distance, to the valley of death. The Roman empire, drunk with the blood of the saints, became the sport of naked barbarians. The German Crcsars, who sought to make a tool of the Church, saw their house become extinct, and their sceptre pass into other hands. Roman republicans have seldom failed to pay a bitter penalty for their temerity in laying hands on an ark watched over in an especial manner by God. The house of Bourbon, which has been guilty of innumerable attempts against the independence of the Church, is now a beggar for its lost hereditary crown. The house of Hapsburg sinned in like manner, and it required Austerlitz and 1848 to teach it the things good for its peace. England, with her Crystal Palace, and her Titles Bill, looked like a very great nation, in 1851; let the Times newspaper say what she is in 1852. She invited all the nations of the earth to come and see her before the angel would begin to cry, Cecidil magna Babylon ! The world must be used as an instrument, or woe to the world and its worshippers.
The other fact, to which we can only briefly allude, is this. When worldlings discover their mistakes in judgment, when they find that the Catholic was right, after all, they quietly amend their opinions, and partially adopt the Catholic view, without, however, conceding the Catholic principle, which no mistake of theirs can lead them to comprehend, and without giving due credit to their Catholic teachers. Let the recent case of Kossuth be cited for a thousand others which might be adduced in point. At present, by far the greater portion of the respectable papers denounce him as an impostor, and his cause as a bad cause, and the people quietly listen and many believe. It is likely that, long before the time named by the Most Rev. Archbishop Hughes, the country will recognize Kossuth as a humbug. Yet, six months ago, the Catholics were almost alone in this just appreciation of the man and of his cause. One year previously, there were several unthinking Catholics who were disposed to defend the mischievous agitator. Two years ago, the editor of this Review, who was the first to call the attention of the American people to the cloud which menaced the country from Hungary, and which has now burst upon us, was heard with ill-concealed impatience on the part of some, when he called the whole Magyar agitation by its right name. The truth slowly, but surely, overtakes the lie. It has required the experience of three hundred years to make the world begin to surmise that the Protestant rebellion of the sixteenth century was an outrage upon civilized Europe. Three hundred years passed before the Roman imperial court reversed the sentence pronounced by its representative, Pontius Pilate, upon our Lord.
Plain talking, then, and plain dealing with Protestants. They cannot understand your principles, unless they be illuminated by the Holy Ghost. Controversies with them are not of much avail, and any concealment of the Catholic dogma, or any thing like an apology for it, is worse than useless. If you wish to be instrumental in the conversion of any of them, pray for them, exhibit the beauty and holiness of the Catholic dogma in the sanctity of your lives, and in that way it is possible that they may begin to suspect that it is for their peace to embrace it. " Let your light so shine before men that they, seeing your good works, may glorify your Father in heaven."