Catholicity and Naturalism

                                                                                                       CATHOLICITY AND NATURALISM

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There was published in the 'Christian Examiner' for January, 1865, an Article, the first in the number, entitled 'The Order of St. Paul the Apostle, and the New Catholic Church,' which has attracted some attention, as boldly presenting rationalism or more properly naturalism as the rival of Christianity, and destined to supplant it, and which is perhaps not unworthy of a brief reply from the believers in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and in supernatural revelation.  

The article is pleasantly written, but more remarkable for literary polish, grace and finish of style, than for depth of thought or force of argument. Its title promises much, and is taking with the public at large; but it sounds a little strange to the Catholic reader, as there happens to be no such order as that of St. Paul the Apostle, and there is and must have existed from the beginning, and continue to exist to the end. A 'new' catholic church is a contradiction in terms. If catholic, the church is for all times and places, never old, never young, but the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, like Him whose spouse she is. No catholic, not out of his wits, ever does or can dream of founding a new catholic church. 

The 'Christian Examiner,' however, refers to the Congregation, not Order, of St. Paul the Apostle, a community of missionary priests in the city of New York, and well known under the name of the Paulists; and who, according to it, have founded, or are laboring to found a new catholic church. Wherefore he so imagines, it is hard even for a Yankee to guess, unless he is so unacquainted with the teachings of Catholic doctors and theologians, as to suppose that their avowed recognition of nature and reason and acceptance of the natural order in its proper place in the economy of divine providence, is necessarily opposed to the Catholic Church. The Paulists undoubtedly believe that the Catholic religion is adapted to the individual and social needs of every people; the unquestionable wish to present it in its purity and integrity to the reason, the intelligence, the hearts, and the consciences of the American people, and with the grace of God assisting, to convert them to the Catholic faith and church; but in this they are only faithful to the injunction, "Go ye into all the earth, and teach all nations."

The 'Christian Examiner' seems not a little surprised and even chagrined to find that what it had imagined must be a new catholic church is no new church at all, but, saving a few phrases which mean nothing, it is the identical old church of the fifteenth century. The Paulists, it asserts, have surrendered nothing, given up no Catholic principle or dogma, but maintain all, even the most offensive old doctrines as rigidly as the Council of Trent itself. It makes from the publications of the Rev. Father Hecker and the sermons by the Paulists, 'a propos'of which the article has been written, a long list of passages which prove that they have not only retained the old dogmas unchanged, but even the old Catholic estimate of Protestantism, and have as little respect for it as had Catholics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet it is very unreasonable to complain of this, for its own estimate of Protestantism, when it means any thing more than pure individualism, is not less favorable. "Mr. Hecker," it says, p. 10, "might have stated the facts much more forcibly, and still kept himself within the limits of truth." "The process of disintegration is going forward with immense rapidity throughout Protestant Christendom." This can hardly be surpassed in severity. Disintegration is decomposition, and decomposition does not usually commence till after the death of the body. Is Father Hecker's offense that he has not remembered the maxim, speak of the dead only good?

The Paulists, unquestionably, make no surrender of any thing Catholic, for they are Catholic priests, and probably believe what their church teaches is revealed truth, without which there is no salvation, no true immortal life, and honest men, earnest men, men of faith can hardly be expected to give up the truth God has taught them till they have lost their reason. They love it; they prize it more than riches and honors, more than ease and pleasure, more than life itself. It is the truth that upholds the intellect, it is the truth that liberates it from ignorance and bondage. Besides, it is plausible that the Paulists are aware that teh truth is not their property, and that no man has a right to give away, to be liberal or generous with, what is not his own. No wise man ever yields any thing he holds to be true for the sake of peace, for he knows that without truth there is no basis for peace. No true man ever deals diplomatically with principle, and every Catholic holds that every dogma of his church is a universal principle, true eternally, and in all orders, and that therefore his church is called Catholic. The Paulists, moreover, are, as they avow, laboring earnestly to convert the American people to the Catholic Church, and they are hardly the men to begin by first converting the church to the American people.  

The 'Christian Examiner' has fallen into several mistakes in its biographical  sketch of the Reverend Father Hecker, the Superior of the Paulist Congregation. Father Hecker was received into the church in 1844, not in 1845 as it asserts, p. 2, and he did not go "to Rome in 1857 for the purpose of obtaining the Papal release from his order [Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer] whose austere regulations were somewhat more than distasteful to him, and whose medieval type of Catholicism seemed to him out of date in this generation, and ill suited to the genius and needs of the American people." This is untrue in all its parts. Father Hecker never complained that "the austere regulations of his order were somewhat more than distasteful to him," and never found them distasteful at all; and as for its medieval type of Catholicity, that is his own type, the 'Christian Examiner' being judge, and precisely that to which he wishes to convert his non-Catholic countrymen. He never solicited, he never wished a release from his order, but accepted it at the request of the Holy Father himself. 

The 'Christian Examiner' has quite misapprehended the views and purposes of the Paulists. They are Catholic missionary priests, nothing more, nothing less. They are innovators neither in doctrine nor discipline. They are neither church-founders nor church-reformers. They seek, undoubtedly, as has already been said, to convert the American people among whom they were born and brought up, to that same Catholic Church to which they have themselves in the full vigor of their intellects been converted. This church, their own spiritual mother, they aim to present as she always was, as she is, and as she always will be. They aim to present her free from those adjuncts or things purely local and temporary which may have been associated with her in other times and nations but which have no necessary connection with her, and were never regarded by her theologians as forming and part of herself. Indeed, all they propose is that Catholics should speak English in London and Washington, as they speak French in Paris, Spanish in Madrid, German in Munich and Vienna, Italian in Florence and Naples, and as they formerly spoke Latin in Rome, Syriac in Damascus, Coptic in Alexandria, Greek in Athens and Constantinople. They know that Catholicity leaves to each people its nationality, and respects all nationalities, though itself superior to them all, and that no people need to denationalize themselves in order to become true and fervent Catholics. 

In laboring for the conversion of the American people they leave American nationality untouched. They go further, and hold and endeavor to prove as all their writings show, that the Catholic religion is what the American people need, not to give them a new civilization they already have, which has, in fact, been borrowed from that very civilization which has grown up under the fostering care and protecting influences of the church herself. They hold that the church harmonizes perfectly with the fundamental principles of American civilization and is needed by our countrymen as their religious support and complement. The 'Christian Examiner' itself concedes that in this respect at least they are logically right. 

"In his second paper from the 'Civilta Cattolica,' Mr. Hecker draws an argument for the future of the Church from the singular correspondence that exists between American institutions and the ideas on which they rest, and the doctrines of the Church of which he is a representative. Here are his positions:--1. That Catholic doctrines are more in accord with American institutions than Protestant doctrines are. 2. That political experience in America has abundantly established the truth of this position, and has actually generated a disposition to return to the Catholic Church, on the part of the more thoughtful, enlightened, and consistent of the advocates of a democratic government. 

That the Catholic dogma is more congenial with democratic institutions than the Protestant, is a fact too clear to be disputed; and if this consideration were of any vital moment, we might leave the case here on the threshold. The principle that lies at the foundation of democratic institutions is 'man's capability for self-government.' This principle implies the essential rectitude of human nature, in all its spheres of faculty. It implies that man is possessed of reason and of free will; that he knows what is wise, just, orderly, beneficial; that he is at liberty to elect it, and that he has the power to enact it. It implies that his natural ideas of what is right, equitable, and obligatory are correct, or may be made so by suitable study, care, and attention. All this the Catholic theology asserts; all this the Protestant theology denies. The Catholic dogma accommodates itself to human reason, assuming its capacity to receive truths presented to it; the Protestant dogma almost vilifies reason in its jealousy for faith, and allows it no power of judgment in matters of moral truth. The Catholic dogma acknowledges man's moral freedom; the Protestant doctrine affirms predestination. The Catholic ought, therefore, to be a democrat; the Protestant ought to be a monarchist. Neither can logically be anything else. 

This logical necessity is confirmed by other peculiarities of the two systems. The Protestant Church makes a radical distinction between different orders of mankind, by classifying them as regenerate and unregenerate, elect and non-elect, children of God and children of the world. It divides by palpable barriers the sheep from the goats. The church-member is a person set apart from the general congregation, as an object of peculiar consideration in the sight of God and men, -- a sacred person specially illuminated, guided, upheld by the Holy Spirit. Here, it would seem, is a basis, something more than speculative, -- a basis actually laid in institutions, -- for the most absolute of all governments, a theocracy, -- a government of priests ruling in the name of God, -- a spiritual oligarchy. The Catholic Church, on the contrary, puts all mankind in the bosom of the Church on an equality. Her sacraments and symbols are for all on the same terms; the same articles of faith satisfy the wise and the simple. All social distinctions disappear at the foot of her altar. Her priesthood is not a caste; no one of the faithful is disqualified by his obscurity for the office of Supreme Pontiff. Side by side, the rich and the poor, the noble and the plebian, the lord and the serf, bend in worship, and kneel on the pavement to receive the consecrated elements. Church and Congregation are one. To be a Christian is to be a Catholic, and to be a Catholic is to be one of the 'elect.' If all were Catholics, all would be Christians, and consequently all would be priests and sons of God." (pp. 16-18)

This in its substance is a very important concession. It concedes the harmony of Catholic teaching with the principles of our American civilization. The 'Christian Examiner,' however, pretends that it amounts to nothing because the people are not logical, and a thousand causes quite independent of their religious convictions go to form their political institutions, and because in point of fact Protestantism has been practically associated with liberty, and Catholicity with despotism.    

"Here it would seem, is a basis--a very practical basis, too--for the most popular form of government, the government that assumes the equality of mankind, the democratic. If communities of men were only logical! If people would only take pains to square their practical with their speculative beliefs! If states would just look to it that their living genius was conformed to their inherited dogma! But, alas! they do not, and they will not. The contradiction between creed and life which preachers are always harping upon, deploring, objurgating, endeavoring vainly to annul, history delights in parading on a grand scale. No nation of modern times exhibits a logical accord between its creed and its life, for either the creed is an inherited tradition and the life an original creation, or the life an inherited tradition and the creed an original creation. The genesis of the two is not contemporaneous, nor do the two births spring from the same stock. The institutions, laws, civil and social arrangements, forms of government and administration, in the nations of modern Europe were determined by a thousand causes--material, organic, ethic, historical,--which were wholly independent of speculative opinions in philosophy and faith; and such opinions as they have were conveyed to them, for the most part, from regions lying outside of themselves,--from other climates and spheres,--and were attached to them by statecraft or priest craft. Thought and life lack thus organic conviction. The thought belongs to one age, the life to another. The discord is not felt, because the necessity of the concord is not felt. A nation will exist hundreds of years with its soul in the Eastern hemisphere and its body in the Western, with its 'faith' in Jerusalem and its knowledge in London, with its speculative reason in Asia Minor and its practical understanding in the United States, with its fancy in the Middle Age and its fact in the present generation, and not feel disturbed by it. No doubt where the nation's being is vigorous the effort is ceaseless and persistent, though unconscious, to establish an equilibrium between its life and its thought; but in all such cases the life takes the initiative, and the vital energies of the people absorb understanding, reason, hope, imagination, more and more, and so reconstruct its views, and insensibly substitute new modes of speculative thinking for old ones. But the new modes of thinking are not a 'scheme,' a 'system,' a 'theology.' The creed is unwritten, unspoken, unrecognized as a creed." (pp. 18-19.) 

There is much truth in this extract, and happily expressed; but it explains as well why Catholicity has sometimes coexisted with arbitrary forms of government as why Protestantism has sometimes been associated with political freedom. All in Catholic nations is not, a never has been thoroughly harmonized with Catholicity, and all Protestant nations have retained from the Catholic Church in the civil order much which their Protestantism has not yet eliminated. Yet it is not true that the people, in the long run, are not logical. They are in their march through the ages strictly and invincibly logical, and sooner or later push their principles even practically to their last consequences. The whole life of every nation is but the logical development of the premises given in the outset. When there is a logical discrepancy between the religious principles and the political principles of a people, wither their religion eliminates their politics, or their politics eliminates their religion. The 'Christian Examiner' itself asserts that the people are logical when it tells us that "the American people are rapidly discarding their old traditional theologies, Lutheranism, Calvinism, Socinianism," because they find them incompatible with the principles they are developing in their life. Why may not the same causes which lead them to discard theologies incompatible with their civilization, lead them in time to accept a theology which is not only compatible with it, but in intimate harmony with it, and tending by its very principles to sustain, invigorate, and perfect it? 

The 'Christian Examiner' is out in its historical reading, when it asserts that "the Catholic Church has always been associated with aristocratic governments, to the extent that has identified it in the common mind with oligarchies, monarchies, despotisms." If so identified, there are no facts to warrant it. The most thoroughly aristocratic, oligarchic, and despotic governments on earth have always been and are non-Catholic, and consequently in real liberty, without which there is no civilization. The great objection, the on urged with the most effect in the sixteenth century against the church, was that she is unfriendly to kingly government, and it was against Cardinal Du Perron, a Catholic, that James the First King of England wrote his 'Remonstrance for the Divine Right of Kings.' The sovereigns in the sixteenth century favored the reformation chiefly because it favored arbitrary pretentions, and relieved them from the restraints which the church, the only power, when the nobles were tyrants, and the people, in a political sense, had no existence, that could in any degree curb their lawless passions and restrain their despotism, imposed on them. England is a more aristocratic or oligarchic country than France. Prussia has always been more despotic than Spain or Italy, Russia and Austria, and Austria finds to-day the chief obstacle to her reorganization on a truly liberal basis in the Protestant population of Hungary. The small Protestant states of Germany tend to found liberal institutions only as Protestantism loses its hold on prince and people. In this country, by the 'Christian Examiner's' own confession, liberty advances only over the ruins of Protestant theologies. 

The 'Christian Examiner' adds inconsiderably that "the Swiss republics have always been Protestant." He forgets that the Swiss republics were founded by Catholics long before the Protestant reformation was born, that one-half of the Swiss cantons are still Catholic, and that the least aristocratic are precisely the Catholic cantons. "The Republic of Holland is Protestant." The 'Republic' of Holland, which in its best days was only an oligarchy, no longer exists, it has been swallowed up by the 'Kingdom' of Holland, less free in its constitution that Belgium, more decidedly Catholic than Holland is Protestant. It is always convenient to know and remember history before appealing to it. 

Moreover, the 'Christian Examiner' does not believe in Protestantism, and has no more respect for it than the Catholic. Just see, how he treats it. 

"The facts that Mr. Hecker cites are indisputable; he might have stated them much more forcibly, and still kept himself within the limits of sober truth. The process of disintegration is going forward with immense rapidity throughout Protestant Christendom. Organizations are splitting asunder, institutions are falling into decay, customs are becoming uncustomary, usages are perishing from neglect, sacraments are deserted by the multitude, creeds are decomposing under the action of liberal studies and independent thought. A tendency to individualism was folded up in the early Protestant movement, and that tendency has gone on towards its ultimate expression in Transcendentalism. All this is plain, too plain for evidence. The process has gone so far, that one of our own most advanced and most resolute thinkers, a leader whom only the boldest followed in his assault on tradition and formalism, has lately surprised his friends by sounding the retreat and calling the fresh recruits back into the old, battered intrenchments, to make themselves safe as well as they can." (p.10.)

This concedes that Protestantism is dead and undergoing the process of decomposition, which is more than most Catholics would venture to assert. "Naturalism is pushing it hard, and we have a firm conviction that it must go." The American people can, then, hope nothing from it in support of their free institutions. But it thinks that the same naturalism that is pushing Protestantism is pushing equally hard the Catholic Church, and is sure that the American people emancipated from Protestantism will not seek repose in Catholicity. They may cease to be Protestants, but will not become Catholics. In what then will they seek to find rest for their souls? "In transcendentalism, or spiritual Christianity." Perhaps so. But what is the transcendentalism or spiritual Christianity, which is neither Catholicity nor Protestantism? The answer is not very definite, but here is what the 'Christian Examiner' says, 

"Transcendentalism, or spiritual Christianity, is no longer the peculiarity of a small intellectual class, who have as much as they can do to maintain themselves against the ridicule of a great public. It is a definite system of philosophical faith, firmly planted on immovable foundations, carefully constructed in its details, popularly expounded, heartily welcomed, and earnestly professed by multitudes of men and women. It has churches and preachers, and is fast making a sacred literature. It has succeeded to a very remarkable extent in recommending its interpretations of the ancient symbols and dogmas. It has a theology, a christology, a consistent account of the Bible and the Church; it gives its definition of inspiration, revelation, and Divine influence. they who accept it are among the calmest, quietest, serenest, and happiest of people. they enjoy as much peace of mind and of heart as the Catholics do, and they enjoy it on more rational grounds, and with a surer confidence. For they fear nothing from science; they welcome knowledge; criticism, and especially criticism from the Scriptures, is all on their side; the movement of things is in their direction; they have a sweet and altogether childlike faith in the spiritual laws. They can afford to tell the truth without equivocation. They can afford to be generous to their opponents. They take no great pains to make proselytes, for the ripe fruit drops into their hands as fast they can catch it. Unrest will not drive these people into the Catholic Church, and as the majority must pass into the Church through them, if they go thither at all, the accessions to it are not likely to be very numerous. So much for the speculative disquiet and despair from which Mr. Hecker hopes so much." (p. 13.)

This is very well in words, but still it may be asked, what is this "definite system of philosophic faith, firmly planted on immovable foundations," that "has its churches, its theology, its christology, and is fast making a sacred literature"? It is "philosophic," and therefore in the natural order. As the 'Christian Examiner' makes its missionaries "industry, enterprise, intelligence," and calls them nature's missionaries, and as the author of the article in the 'Christian Examiner' calls it in another publication, the 'New Religion of Nature,' it may be safely concluded that it is pure naturalism, and includes nothing that is not explicable on purely natural principles. It certainly rejects all supernatural revelation, and all supernatural intervention in the affairs of men or of the world. It stands opposed to all supernaturalism, and rejects both Protestantism and Catholicity so far as they assert a supernatural revelation, supernatural intervention, and a supernatural order. Decidedly then, if anything, it is pure naturalism, and admits nothing but natural development. That is what the American people are to fall back upon when they have ceased to be Protestants, and this will have for them far more charms than Catholicity.

No doubt, individuals may find it so-for a time, but that a whole people will is questionable. Man is a social being, and will never rest in pure individualism; which necessarily excludes all ideas of government, society, solidarity, and brings back the state of nature asserted by Hobbes, which is only a state of war, in which the right is to the strongest. Man is also in some sense naturally religious, and religion is as necessary to his soul as food to his body. How then can we expect men to be full-grown, hearty, robust men under a system that excludes all society, all social organization, all government, all religious faith, hope, or love, all forms of worship, but such as theorists with "malice aforethought" may attempt, like Auguste Comte, to institute? Man too is a rational animal, and reason is in man a perpetual aspiration to know the origin and end, the principles and causes of all things, and these unhappily for the naturalists all have their root in the supernatural, and are placed by Mr. Herbert Spencer in that division of things which he calls the Unknowable. How then can naturalism satisfy reason, of which the American people participate as largely as any other people, and who are proverbially curious and aspiring?  

It may not always be good logic to argue from the want to supply, or to conclude the truth of the Catholic religion from its adaptation to the genius and needs of American civilization. Many persons of strong reasoning  powers, sound judgment, and good sense have found Dr. Channing's conclusion that Christianity must be true, because it meets the wants of the soul, inconclusive, but it is not reasonable to suppose that men will rest contented in a system that obviously can satisfy neither their intellectual nor their moral wants. Neither of these wants of man does or can naturalism supply. Few men are contented to say two and two, two and two, without adding,-make four. Naturalism excludes from both science and faith whatever is not explicable on natural principles. It excludes therefore form both the first and final cause of all things, and stops with second causes alone. Before it and behind it all is impenetrable darkness, and it is impossible to prevent thinking, reasoning, reflecting men, who feel with Schiller, 'ernst ist das Leben,' life is serious and not to be trifled away, from sending longing glances into that darkness, and praying from some ray of celestial light to illumine it, if but for a moment. 

The 'Christian Examiner' speaks of the rest, the content and joy of the worshippers in its naturalistic churches; but from men's sensations in the battle, in the first flush of partial success, it is not safe to conclude how they will feel when the battle is over, the struggle ended, the triumph obtained, and there remain no longer any enemies to combat, any more worlds to conquer. The combatants for naturalism have all brought into combat the arms, the discipline, and the forces supplied by a system not their own, indeed by that very supernaturalism which they reject as degrading to human nature, and repugnant to human reason. Let them succeed, and they will find after the first joy of success is over that in their conquests they have only despoiled themselves, and their rest, if rest they have, will be that of the stock or stone. 

Naturalism denies the supernatural and affirms that there has never been any supernatural revelation, any supernatural intervention in human affairs. Whence then have originated all these religions, Jewish, Christian, Mahometan, and all those cruel, barbarous, and enslaving pagan superstitions both before and since the Christian era? The 'Christian Examiner' must hold that they are natural, the outgrowth of human nature. Then why war against them? Why expect from nature alone any thing different? If human nature has developed them, they must be, on its principles, true and good. If nature has developed them, how can it be pretended that nature does not need them, and can have her full and free development without them? If she has developed them all through the past, how can it be certain that she will not continue to develop them all through the future? If there is nothing above nature, no supernatural, nothing but nature, then nature can never get out of nature, and what nature is and can and will do can only be inferred from what she has been and done. 

Is it answered that all religions are symbolical, and symbolize, each in its way, more or less of the natural order, and that when, as the worshippers in the churches of the new religion have done, we have penetrated the symbol and got at its philosophical or scientific sense, the symbol is rejected, and can never be restored? That all religions are symbolical, and symbolize truths or facts of the natural order even is unquestionably true, but that they symbolize 'only' truths of facts of that order is far more easily asserted than proved. How know you that they do not, some imperfectly, the Christian perfectly, symbolize the supernatural, and what when you have extracted what belongs to the natural, you are not still as far as ever from having obtained their higher and real significance, or given them their true and full scientific explication? Men sometimes see no more, not because there is no more to be seen, but because their sight is no longer, nor stronger. The child fancies that the horizon that bounds our vision bounds the universe, and that by ascending yonder hill on which the sky seems to rest, it could play with the rainbow,-it is a child's fancy, not a man's. 

Will the 'Christian Examiner' appeal to development? There is, no doubt, development, natural development even, but development only unfolds or brings out what was originally in the germ. It can create nothing, nor even go on without borrowing from the medium in which it takes place. Without the supernatural there can be no natural development. Nature did not originate herself, and could originate only in the supernatural; nor can she even subsist and operate without the constant, efficient presence of the supernatural. The 'Christian Examiner' has little to hope from future developments. Euhermerus long ago anticipated the modern positivists and nature-worshippers in their explication of the symbols, and the old Epicureans, their real ancestors, were fully up on this point at least to their scientific level. They did not in just so many words deny the gods, as that might have brought them into collision with the police, as it did not long since the late Abner Kneeland, in Massachusetts; but they gave them nothing ot do, put them "asleep up above," and reduced man, -in their theories-to pure nature. The were learned and eloquent, rich, polished, genteel, and had their orator, professors, poets, and philosophers. They had for a time a large portion of the upper and educated classes of the Roman Empire, which was then the whole civilized world, with them. Yet the Stoics and Neo-platonists carried it over them, and the Catholics carried it over both Stoics and Neo-platonists, and brought the empire back to belief in the supernatural, even to belief in a crucified God, and the power and dignity of the Cross. 'Argumentum ab ease ad posse valet.' What has been may be. The conversion of the American people to the church would be a less wonderful thing than the conversion of the Roman Empire. 

The 'Christian Examiner' undoubtedly places its hopes in the progress of science, and the intelligence of the age and country; but the progress of modern science lies all in the secondary order, in the observation of facts and the explication of the laws of nature; valuable in its order indeed, but throwing no new light on first principles, or the origin and reason of things. The intelligence of the age will soon grow dim, and well-nigh disappear in the darkness if the supernatural be rejected, and men reduced to simple exclusive naturalism. If you can once get men to confine their thoughts and wishes to the low sphere of naturalism, and to be contented with it, the will soon cease to aspire, lose sight of the ideal, become gross and material, as incurious and as unprogressive as the savage. Is that what the 'Christian Examiner' would call progress, a progress in losing, not in gaining? Does it agree with Rousseau, that "the man who thinks is already a depraved animal," and that the savage state is preferable to the civilized? Placed on this narrow island called Nature, surrounded on all sides by an impressionable and untraversable ocean of darkness, unable and forbidden to aspire,-to know any thing above or beyond mere creatures,-what would there be to stimulate man's intellectual activity, or to awaken his reason? He would be born, grow up, propagate his species, snatch the few sensible pleasures within his reach, die, and be forgotten. Is there any thing more to be expected from naturalism? 

"The American people are in search of a philosophy, rather than a faith. Now a philosophy is what the church never gave or professed to give." Can naturalism give them a philosophy? Can nature explain her own origin or end? Do you call that philosophy that stops at second causes, and never rises to the principles and reason of things? From nature you can get only nature. The observation and explication of the facts and laws of nature, without carrying them up to their first, or forward to their final cause, is only secondary science, very useful and desirable in its order, but it is not philosophy and more than it is theology. Whether the church gives a philosophy or not, it is certain that naturalism does not, and cannot give one, for it is, in fact, the denial of philosophy.  

Moreover, if the American people are in search of a philosophy, it is that through philosophy they may attain to faith in the supernatural, that they may justify the traditional faith of the race, convert the unbelieving, or strengthen and confirm the weak and hesitating. That the church does not teach dogmatically a philosophy in so far as philosophy is solely the work of natural reason, is true enough; but philosophy has received its grandest and richest developments in her schools in connection with her dogmatic teaching, and all who discard wholly that teaching have utterly failed to give the world a philosophy. The greatest masters of philosophic thought, since Plato and Aristotle, have been her great theologians, as St. Augistine, St. Anselm, St. Bonaventura, St. Thomas, Thomassin, Malebranche, Fenelon, to mention no others. The greatest of all modern philosophers not in her communion is the German, Leibnitz; but Leibnitz defended the Catholic dogmas, and in their light constructed his philosophy. Amongst the rejectors of supernatural revelation, or those who confined themselves to the strictly natural order, no philosopher in ancient or modern times can be named whose philosophy the man to the level of Christian civilization does not reject as a tissue of absurdities or puerilities. The reason of this is plain enough. Without supernatural revelation the philosopher cannot place himself in the position to solve, or to perceive even as far as they are rationally apprehensible and solvable, the great problems of philosophy. Plato and Aristotle had supernatural revelation, as far as it was preserved in the traditions of the gentiles, and hence their merits; but those traditions retained it only in an imperfect or mutilated form, and hence their defects. The eminent philosophers among Protestants also have it in the measure in which Protestants have retained the tradition of it, and hence, however defective that tradition may be with them, they are able to touch philosophical questions from a higher plane than simple nature. 

The 'Christian Examiner' apparently forgets that we who believe in the supernatural revelation of God have all the nature that the adherents of naturalism have. We may have, and most likely have more than they have, more than is dreamt of by their philosophy, but we cannot possibly have less. The supernatural, even if an illusion, leaves to the believer all that there is of nature. It does not supersede nature, weaken or distort its power. They can offer the American people nothing that we have not as well as they. Nature is as open to us as to them, and nothing in the Bible or the church prevents the Christian from pushing his investigations as freely and as far into nature as they can theirs. Supernatural revelation, if real, adds to a reason and nature faith, which is a logical knowledge above their reach, and enlarges their boundaries; but in no case does it or can it diminish their power, or circumscribe the sphere of their observation and induction. The church places no restrictions on science, and interferes never with scientific explications, if really scientific as they are. All she does is to forbid her children, in the interest alike of natural and revealed truth, to put forth 'as true and established,' our conjectures, our theories, our speculations, 'if they tend to unsettle faith,' where they have not been scientifically verified and converted into real science. It is well to note this, and to bear in mind that, on any conceivable hypothesis, faith does not supersede reason, or discourage its exercise; and, in point of fact, the men who have made the greatest scientific discoveries and done the most to advance modern science to its present proud position, have all been men born and brought up in the bosom of Christian civilization, and educated in Christian schools, colleges, or universities. If some of them have seen proper to calumniate the mother that bare them, and to rend the bosom that nourished them, it is their fault or madness as individuals, but it cannot alter the fact that they have been formed under Christian civilization and Christian influences, and could have been formed under no other. Has science been advanced in modern times by men formed under the Chinese, the Hindoo, or the Mahometan civilization? Whence comes the superiority of the Christian civilization to all others but from Christianity itself, and Christianity even as a supernatural religion?

The 'Christian Examiner' claims great success for its "philosophic faith." The transcendentalists, it says, "take no pains to make proselytes. The ripe fruit drops into their hands as fast as they can catch it." Might it not more properly have said, the fruit that rots and falls from the tree before it is ripe? "They have their churches." How many? They have a feeble congregation in the city of New York, consisting, it is said, of a few hundred members, and they had one and a stronger one, in the city of Boston, before Theodore Parker died, and perhaps still have one; but where else have they one on this continent? Fanny Wright's Hall of Science has long since been broken up, and Mr. Robert Dale Owen, one of its founders, has at least abandoned naturalism. The Unitarians have several churches, but the greater part of them from the anti-supernaturalism of the Article of the 'Christian Examiner,' and retain, if little, still too much of traditional Christianity to accept naked naturalism.

"They who accept it are among the calmest, quietest, serenest and happiest of people." Perhaps so; and yet the 'Christian Examiner' says, "one of our most advanced and most resolute thinkers, a leader whom only the boldest followed,...has recently surprised his friends by sounding the retreat, and calling the fresh recruits back into the old, battered attachments." This would seem to indicate that the 'Christian Examiner' has been deceived by appearances. This leader's example may prove contagious, and large numbers may follow it. The bare horror of naturalism into which transcendentalism threatened to plunge its followers, caused, before him, large numbers, who had not advanced so far, to recoil and seek refuge elsewhere. Was it not so with Brownson, Wilson and Patterson, Coolidge and Huntington, and many others that need not be named, who have either returned to the church or sought security in Protestant sects that have retained the principle Catholic dogmas? May not these be taken as an earnest of the ultimate return to belief in the supernatural of the great mass of those who have hitherto been following the tendency to naturalism?     

To this naturalism, from which serious and earnest minds are already recoiling with horror, the 'Christian Examiner' professes to believe the American people will yield themselves, when they have ceased to be Protestants, as cease they will. They will not, it tells us, become Catholics. Perhaps they will not; yet at the bottom they are a serious, and earnest, and a brave people, and their very vices spring from the richness and nobility of their nature. They are wanting in none of the heroic elements of human nature, and have a more real solidarity with the church, through their Christian civilization, their common law, their republican institutions, and their moral theology than they themselves are aware of. The church, too, in their midst, with her celestial light, a light which cannot be hid, and which sends its rays to illumine the darkness which envelops the people outside of her communion, and it is far more reasonable to suppose that they will learn to distinguish between her Catholicity, which cannot fail to attract them, and some foreign associations which repel them, and return to her, and seek rest in their Father's house, than it is to suppose that they will definitely take up with sheer naturalism, which, whatever imposing names it may bear, or brilliant costume it may be decked with, is only another name for Christianity without Christ, and religion without God. Forced to choose between Catholicity and no religion, and perceiving the harmony which the 'Christian Examiner' confesses between its principles, and those of their political institutions, they may in time lose their prejudices against her, which are chiefly political, may see and examine her claims in a more impartial frame of mind, and discover that their hostility to her heretofore has arisen form their misapprehension of her real character, and their confounding whatever they have found offensive or objectionable in the lives of Catholics or the acts of Catholic nations with Catholicity itself, and be prepared to listen with open minds and open hearts to the teaching of the Catholic missionary, and finally come to find joy and gladness in believing. 

"This," says the 'Christian Examiner,' p. 26, in its second article, written apparently to neutralize the first, "will be known as the age of secession;....but perhaps we have not thought how far political secession comes of theological schism." Certain it is, that with the American people theological schism is the leading Protestant denominations preceded actual political secession, and men are now beginning to discover that there is a closer connection between the moral and religious convictions of a people and their political conduct than it has been latterly supposed. Many minds are beginning to suspect that the only effectual guaranty of national unity is in religious unity. The state, not any more than the church, can be based on pure individualism, according to the 'Christian Examiner,' the only living principle of Protestantism, and it is not unlikely that the terrible struggle in which the United States are now engaged for national existence and unity may turn attention to religious unity, and lead reflecting men to ask themselves very seriously if they can find that unity anywhere outside of the Catholic Church. "There is a Divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we will," and God in his Providence uses even the passions of men to bring about his purposes. The civil war has led the 'Christian Examiner,' in one article, to assert a connection between religion and politics it had denied in another, to assert not only a connection between religion and politics, but to disclaim all solidarity with those who dream of a Christianity without the supernatural.

"There is a copula between nature and the supernatural, as much as of any thing above with what is below. If 'nature' be not at all, with God and spirit merged in it, the 'supernatural' must be. 'Anti-supernaturalism' is out of place 'in the pulpit' on the ground of any religion, to say nothing of Christianity; and to define the Christian miracles as unnatural, or violations of nature, or as more wondrous in themselves than any thing else, or wonderful at all to God, is the art of their enemies, not the wisdom of their friends." (p. 38.)

This shows a tendency in a right direction, and proves that even the Unitarians, as a body, will not accept pure, naked, unmitigated naturalism. No error can long live where the truth is at hand to take its place: and it is not improbable that the present civil war, notwithstanding the mistakes of some individual Catholics, may result in correcting not a few religious as well as political errors, and in placing as well as the politics of the nation on a solid and imperishable foundation, and thus aid the American people in fulfilling their mission and working out their glorious destiny. 

But be this as it may, the 'Christian Examiner,' whether it speaks with a single or a double tongue, will never succeed in persuading any considerable number of our countrymen that Christianity without Christ, and religion without God, is either the Christian religion or any religion at all. If they are driven to accept it as the best thing there is for man, they will not accept it as religion, or even as philosophy, but will call it plainly and bluntly what it is, atheism in relation to God, and anarchy in relation to society. Yet if they lose their Protestantism, without finding Catholicity, they will not stop at naturalism, as the rise and spread among them of both Mormonism and spiritism, whose successes shame those of the transcendentalists, abundantly prove. Men must and will have a religion of some sort. This world is too bleak and wintry to permit them to walk abroad in the simplicity of nature, and when they lose the supernatural robes of true religion they will make themselves aprons of the fig-leaves of superstition. When they can no longer get an answer from the powers above to their questions as to their origin and end, they will invoke the powers below, as Saul, when he could get no answer from God, resorted to the Witch of Endor. They must and will worship, and when they have lost God they will worship the devil: for they can worship only something they believe to be superior to themselves and visible nature. 

The 'Christian Examiner' would do well to study the old heathen mythologies, and the fearful and abominable superstitions into which the gentiles fell after their apostasy. No men are so credulous as skeptics, who, as Clement of Alexandria said of the Greeks, can believe any thing and every thing but the truth; and no people are so open to superstition as they who have no faith in God and his revelation. Abner Kneeland could not believe in God, but he could and did believe that a little girl, by looking into a stone placed in a hat, could see things at the bottom of the ocean. It need not surprise anyone to find even the writer of the article in the 'Christian Examiner,' though having no belief in St. Paul, or even in the evangelical history of our Lord, vaunting Andrew Jackson Davis as a true seer, and accepting the teachings of his lying spirits as the living and eternal truth. The great movement in which he believes, he tells us, was commenced by Luther, and Emerson is its best representation as yet. Some persons have asked how it can continue on beyond Emerson without going off into vacuity: but beyond Emerson is demonism, which under the name of spiritualism is now spreading rapidly throughout the land. Its earliest receivers were unbelievers, men who could not believe in the gospel or in the existence of God. They could not believe the prphets and apostles, but they could believe the spirit-rappers. In this low and vulgar superstition, which in time may grow into a creed, will the American people take refuge, if they cease to be Protestants without becoming Catholics. Is the 'Christian Examiner' prepared to accept it? Or is it unaware that only the church has delivered the world from the ancient superstitions, and that it is only she that has the power to save the American people from this new and growing demon-worship, as illusory as the ancient, and capable of becoming equally cruel and enslaving? 

The 'Christian Examiner,' thought firmly convinced that the American people will cease to be Protestants, yet contends that Protestantism, in one or another of its forms, will continue to be their religion. "Nature has missionaries who travel faster than the brothers of the order of St. Paul. They are industry, enterprise, intelligence, knowledge, the awakened capacities of man."-p,26. Was there no industry, no enterprise, no intelligence, no knowledge, no mental and physical activity before Luther? Will Protestants accept these missionaries that carry a Christianity without Christ, a religion without God; missionaries solely of the material order, as their missionaries? Is there any form of properly so called that believes in nothing above the material order? If so, it can no sense be called a religion. And when men are reduced to the material order alone, what will remain to awaken and exercise their higher and nobler faculties? What motive will they have to cultivate their spiritual nature, and to strive to be high, noble-minded men? You reduce them to be mere bodies without souls and they will seek only the goods of the body. Having reduced Christianity to a mere religion of the body, how can you look honest men in the face and call it "spiritual Christianity," "transcendentalism," and cry out against the formalism, the materialism, and the sensuousness of Catholicity! 

Has the writer already leaped the precipice? If so, we will hope that American people will not follow him. That they will see that although Protestantism served their material growth in the infancy of their nation, it cannot be the religion of its manhood. That without ceasing to respect the many noble qualities and hardy virtues of their Protestant ancestors, they will seek for the true principle of unity in the Catholic Church, and find there, a consecration of their nationality and a firm support of their free and republican institutions.