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Primeval Man (Catholic World, 1869)

Primeval Man.*

 

___________

From the Catholic World for September, 1869.

 

THERE are few more active or able members of the Eng-

lish House of Lords or of the British ministry than the

Scottish Duke of Argyll, and, if we could forget the treason

to the Stuarts and the Scottish nation of some of his ances-

tors, there are few scholars and scientific men in the United

Kingdom whom we should be disposed to treat with greater

respect.  He is at once a statesman, ascientist, and a the-

ologian; and in all three capacities has labored earnestly to

serve his country and civilization. In politics, he is, of

course, a whig, or, as is now said, a liberal; as a theologian,

he belongs to the Kirk of Scotland, and may be regarded as

a Calvinist; as a man of science, his aim appears to be to

assert the freedom and independence of science, without

compromising religion. His work on the Reign of Law, 

reviewed and sharply criticised by us, * was designed to com-

bat the atheistic tendencies of modern scientific theories, by

asserting final causes, and resolving the natural laws of the 

physicists into the direct and immediate will of God.

In the present work, quite too brief and sketchy, he treats

of the primeval man, and maintains man's origin in the

creative act of God, against the developmentists and natural

selectionists, which is well, as far as it goes. He treats,

also, of the antiquity of man, and of his primeval condition.

He appears disposed to allow man a higher antiquity than

we think the facts in the case warrant; but, though he dis-

sents, to some extent, from the theory of the late Anglican

Archbishop of Dublin, we find him combating with great

success the savage theory of Sir John Lubbock, who main-

tains that man began in the lowest form of barbarism in

which he can subsist as man, and has risen to his present

state of civilization by his own spontaneous and unassisted

efforts--a theory just now very generally adopted in the

non-Catholic world, and assumed as the basis of the modern

doctrine of progress--the absurdest doctrine that ever

gained currency among educated men. 

The noble duke very properly denies the origin of species

in development, and the production of new species by

"natural selection," as Darwin holds, and acceded to by Sir

Charles Lyell and an able writer in The Quarterly for last

April. The duke maintains that man was created man, not

developed from the lower species, from the tadpole or mon-

key. But while he asserts the origin of species in the cre-

ative act of God, he supposes God supplies extinct species

by creating new species by successive creative acts; thus

losing the unity of the creative act, placing multiplicity in

the origin of things, and favoring that very atheistical ten-

dency he aims to war against. His Reign of Law, though

well-intended, and highly praised by our amiable friend, M.

Augustin Cochin, of Le Correspondant, showed us that the

noble author has failed both in his theology and philosophy.

In resolving the natural laws into the will of God enforcing

itself by power, he fails to recognize any distinction be-

tween first cause and second cause, and, therefore, between

the natural and the supernatural. God does all, not only as

first cause, or causa eminens, as say the theologians, but as

the direct and immediate actor, which, of course, is panthe-

ism, itself only a form of atheism. Yet we know not that

his grace could have done better, with Calvinism for his

theology, and the Scottish school, as finished by Sir William

Hamilton, for his philosophy. To have thoroughly refuted

the theories against which he honorably protests, he must

have known Catholic theology, and the Christian view of

the creative act. We have no disposition, at present, to

discuss the antiquity either of man or the globe. If the

fact that God, in the beginning, created heaven and earth,

and all things therein, visible and invisible, is admitted and

maintained, we know not that we need, in the interest of

orthodoxy, quarrel about the date when it was done. Time

began with the externization of the divine creative act, and

the universe has no relation beyond itself, except the re-

lation of the creature to the creator. Considering the late

date of the Incarnation, we are not disposed to assign man a

very high antiquity, and no geological or historical facts are,

as yet, established that require it for their explanation.

We place little confidence in the hasty inductions of geolo-

gists.

But the primitive condition of man has for us a deeper in-

terest; and we follow the noble duke with pleasure in his

able refutation of the savage theory of Sir J. Lubbock. Sir

John evidently holds the theory of development, and that

man has been developed from a lower species. He assumes

that his primitive human state was the lowest form of bar-

barism in which he could subsist as man. With regard to

man's development from lower animals, it is enough to say

that development cannot take place except where there are

living germs to be developed, and can only unfold and

bring out what is contained in them. But we find in man,

even in the lowest form of savage life, elements, language

or articulate speech, for instance, of which there are no

germs to be found in the animal kingdom. We may dis-

miss that theory and assume at once that man was created,

and created man. But was his condition in his primitive

state that of the lowest form of barbarism?  Is the savage

the primitive man, or the degenerate man? The former is

assumed in almost every scientific work we meet; it is de-

fended by all the advocates of the modern doctrine that man

is naturally progressive. Saint-Simon, in his Nouveau

Christianisme, asserts that paradise is before us, not behind

us; and even some who accept the Biblical history have ad-

vanced so little in harmonizing their faith with what they call

their science, that they do not hesitate to suppose that man

began his career, at least after the prevarication of Adam,

is downright savagism. Even the learned Dollinger so far

falls in with the modern theory as to make polished gentil-

ism originate in disgusting fetichism.

The noble duke sufficiently refutes the theory of Sir John

Lubbock, but does not seem to us to have fully grasped and

refuted the assumptions on which it is founded. "His two

main lines of argument," he says, "connect themselves with

the two following propositions, which he undertakes to

prove, First, that there are indications of progress even

among savages; and second, that among civilized nations

there are traces of barbarism."

The first proposition is not proved of provable. The

characteristic of the savage is to be unprogressive. Some

tribes may be more or less degraded than others. The

American Indian ranks above the New Hollander; but,

whether more or less degraded, we never find savages lifting

themselves, by their own efforts into even a comparatively

civilized state. Niebuhr says there is no instance on record

of a savage tribe having become a civilized people by its

own spontaneous efforts; and Heeren remarks that the

description of the tribes eastward of the Persian Gulf along

the borders of the Indian Ocean, by the companions of

Alexander, applies perfectly to them as we now find them.

No germs of civilized life are to be found among them, or,

if so, they are dead, not living germs, incapable of devel-

opment. The savage is a thorough routinist, the slave of

petrified customs and usages. He shows often great skill

in constructing and managing his canoe, in making and

ornamenting his bow or his war-club; but one generation 

never advance on its predecessor, and the new generation

only reproduces the old. All the arts the savage has have

come, as his idea, to a stand-still. He is stern, sad, gloomy,

as if oppressed by memory, and exhibits none of the joyous-

ness of frolicsomeness which we might expect from his

fresh young life, if he represented the infancy or childhood

of the race, as pretended.

Even in what are called civilized heathen nations we find

a continual deterioration; but no indication of progress in

civilization, or in those elements which distinguish civilized

from barbaric or savage life. Culture and polish may be

the concomitants of civilization, but do not constitute it.

The generations that built the pyramids, Babylon, Nineveh,

Thebes, Rome, were superior to any of their successors.

No subsequent Greek poet ever came up to Homer, and the

oldest of the Vedas surpass the powers of the Indian people

in any generation more recent than that which produced

them. The Chinese cannot to-day produce new works to com-

pare with those of Confucius. Where now are the once re-

nowned nations of antiquity whose ships ploughed every

sea, and whose armies made the earth tremble with their

tread? Fallen, all the fallen, and remain only in their

ruins, and the page of the historian or song of the bard. If

these nations, so great and powerful, with so many elements

of a strong civilization, could not sustain themselves from

falling into barbarism, how pretend that the lowest and

most degraded savages can, without any foreign assistance,

lift themselves into a civilized state?

The second proposition, that civilized nations retain

traces of barbarism, proves nothing to the purpose. These

traces, at most, prove only that the nations in which we de-

tect them have passed through a state of barbarism, as we

know modern nations have; not that barbarism was, in any

form, the primitive condition of the race. It is not pre-

tended that no savage tribe had ever been civilized; what is

denied is, that the race began in the savage state, or that, if

it had so begun, it could ever have risen by its own natural

forces alone to civilization. There is no evidence that the

cruel and bloody customs, traces of which we find in civ-

ilized nations, were those of the primeval man. The

polished and cultivated Romans were more savage in their

customs than the northern barbarians who overthrew their

civilization, much to the relief of mankind. When the late

Theodore Parker drew a picture of the New Zealander in

order to describe Adam, he proceeded according to his the-

ory of progress, but without a shadow of authority. We

find a cruelty, an inhumanity, an oppression, bloody and

obscene rites, among polished nations--as Rome, Syria,

Phoenicia, and modern India--that we shall look in vain for

among downright savages; which shows that we owe them

to cultivation, to development, that is, to "development,"

as the noble duke well says, "in corruption."

But these traces of so-called barbarism among civilized

nations are more than offset by remains of civilization which

we find in savage tribes. Sir J. Lubbock and others take

these remains as indications of progress among savages;

but they mistake the evening twilight deepening into dark-

ness, for that of the morning ushering in the day. This is

evident from the fact that they are followed by no progress.

They are reminiscences, not promises. If germs, they never

germinate; but have been deprived of the vitality. To

us, paganism bears witness in all its forms that it has degener-

ated from its norma, or type; not that it is advancing toward

it. We see in its incoherence, its incongruities and inequali-

ties, that it is a fall or departure from something higher, more

living and more perfect. Any one studying Protestantism, in

any of its forms, may see that it is not an original system of

religion; that is a departure from its type, not an ap-

proach to it; and, if we know well the Catholic Church, we

see at once that in her is the type that Protestantism loses,

corrupts, or travesties. So paganisms bears unmistakable

evidence of what we know from authentic history, that, 

whether with polished gentiles or with rude savages and

barbarians, its type, from which it recedes, is the patriarchal

religion. We know that it was an apostasy or falling away

from that religion, the primitive religion of the race, as

Protestantism is an apostasy or falling away from the Cath-

olic Church. Protestantism, in the modern world, is what

gentilsim was in the ancient; and as gentilism is the re-

ligion of all savage or barbarian tribes, we have in Prot-

testantism a key for explaining whatever is dark or obscure

in their history. We see in Protestant nations a tendency

to lose or throw off more and more of what they retained

when they separated from the church, and which, before

the lapse of many generations, if not arrested, will lead

them to a hopeless barbarism. The traces of Catholic faith

we find in them are reminiscences, not prophecies.

We find with the lowest and most degraded savages, lan-

guage, and often a language of great richness, singular beauty

and expressiveness. Terms for which savages have no use

may sometimes be wanting, but it is rare that the language

cannot be made to supply them from its resources. In the

poorest language of a savage tribe, there is always evidence of

its having been the language of a people superior in ideas

and culture to the present condition of those who speak it.

Language, among savage tribes, we take to be always indic-

ative of a lost state far above that of barbarism; and it 

not only refutes the theory of natural progress, but, as far

as it goes, proves the doctrine of primitive instruction by

the Creator, maintained by Dr. Whately, and only partially

accepted by his Grace of Argyll.

Language is no human invention, nor the product of in-

dividual or social progress. It requires language to invest

language, and there is no individual progress out of society,

and no society is possible without language. Hence, ani-

mals may be gregarious, but not sociable. They do not, and

never can, form society. Max Miller has disposed of the

bow-wow theory, or the origin of language in the imitation

of the cries of animals, and also of the theory that supposes

it to originate in the imitation of the sounds of nature, as

buzz, rattle, &c; for if a few words could originate in this

way, language itself could not, since there is much more in

language than words. The more common theory, just now,

and which had respectable names in its favor, is that God is

indeed the author of language, but as causa eminens, as he

is of all that nature does; that is, he does not directly teach

man language, but creates him with the power or faculty

of speaking, and making himself understood by articulate

speech. But this theory will not bear examination.

Between language and the faculty of using it there is a

difference, and no faculty creates its own object. The fac-

ulty of speaking could no more be exercised without

language, than the faculty of seeing without a visible ob-

ject. Where there is no language, the faculty is and must

be inoperative. The error is in supposing that the faculty

of using language is the faculty of creating language, which

it cannot be; for, till the language is possessed and held in

the mind, there is nothing for the faculty of speech to oper-

ate on or with. To have given man the faculty of speech,

the Creator must have begun by teaching him language, or

by infusing it with the meaning of its words into his mind.

We misapprehend the very nature and office of language, if

we suppose it can possibly be used except as learned

from or taught by a teacher. Man, as second cause, can

no more produce language than he can create something

from nothing. If God made us as second causes capable of

creating language, why can we not do it now, and master it

without a long and painful study? Since the faculty must

be the same in all men, why do not all men speak one and

the same dialect?

We will suppose man had language from the fist. But 

there is no language without discourse of reason. A parrot

or a crow may be taught to pronounce single words, and

even sentences, but it would be absurd to assert that either

has the faculty of language. To have language and be able

to use it, one must have knowledge, and the sense of the

word must precede, or at least be simultaneous with the word.

Both the word and its meaning must be associated in the

mind. How then could the Creator give man the faculty 

of language, without imparting to him in some way the

ideas and principles it is fitted to express, and without ex-

pressing which it cannot be language? He must do so, or

there could be no verbum mentis, and the word would be

spoken without meaning. Moreover, all language is pro-

foundly philosophical, and conforms more nearly to the

reality of things than any human system yet attained to, not

only by savages, but by civilized and cultivated men; and

whenever it deviates from that reality, it is when it has

been corrupted by the false systems and methods of philos-

ophers. In all languages, we find subject, predicate, and cop-

ula. The copula is always the verb to be, teaching those who

understand it that nothing existing can be affirmed except

by being and in its relation to being, that is God, who is

QUI EST. Were ignorant savages able distinctly to recognize

and embody in language the ideal formula, when no philos-

opher can ever apprehend and consider it unless represented

to him in words? Impossible.

We can take language, therefore, as a reminiscence among

savages of a previous civilization, and a conclusive proof

that, up to a certain point at least, the primeval man, as Dr.

Whately maintains, was and must have been instructed by

his Maker. As language is never known save as learned

from a teacher, its existence among the lowest and most

degraded barbarians is a proof that the primeval man was

not, and could not have been an untutored savage. The

Anglican archbishop, having, as the Scottish duke, no

proper criterion of truth, may have included in the primi-

tive instruction more than it actually contained. An error

of this sort in an Anglican should surprise no one. Truth

or sound philosophy from such a source would be the only 

thing to surprise us. We do not suppose Adam was direct-

ly instructed in all the mechanic arts, in the whole science

and practice of agriculture, or in the entire management of

flocks and herds, nor that he had steam-engines, spinning-

jennies, power-looms, steamboats, railroads, locomotives, 

palace-cars, or even lightning-telegraphs. We do not sup-

pose that the race, in relation to the material order, received

any direct instructions, except of the most elementary kind,

or in matters of prime necessity, or high utility to its phys-

ical life and health. The ornamental arts, and other matters

which do not exceed man's natural powers, may have been

left to man to find out for himself, though we have in-

stances recorded in which some of them were taught by

direct inspiration, and many modern inventions are only

the reproduction of arts once known, and subsequently lost

or forgotten.

It is not difficult to explain how our modern advocates of

progress have come to regard the savage as the primeval

man, and not as the degenerate man. Their theory of nat-

ural progress demands it, and they have always shown great

facility in accommodating their facts to their theories.

They take also their starting-point in heathenism of com-

paratively recent origin, and study the law of human devel-

opment in the history of gentilism. They forget that gen-

tilism originated in an apostasy from the patriarchal or

primitive moral and religious order, and that, from the first,

there remained, and always has remained, on earth a people

that did not apostatize, that remained faithful to tradition,

to the primitive instruction and wisdom. They fail to con-

sider that, language confounded and the race dispersed,

those who remained nearest the original seats of civiliza-

tion, and were separated by the least distance from the peo-

ple that remained faithful, became the earliest civilized or 

polished gentile nations, and that those who wandered fur-

ther into the wilderness--receding further and further from

light, losing more and more of their original patrimony, cut

off from all intercourse with civilization by distance, by dif-

ference of language, and to some extent, perhaps, by phys-

ical changes and convulsions of the globe, degenerated

gradually into barbarians and savages. Occasionally, in the

course of ages, some of these wandering and degenerate

tribes were brought under the influence of civilization by

the arts, the arms, and the religion of the more civilized

gentile nations. But in none has the gentile civilization,

in the proper sense of the term, ever risen above what the

gentiles took with them from the primitive stock, when

they apostatized. Protestant nations are below, not above,

what they were at the epoch of the reformation. The re-

formers were greatly superior to any of their successors.

But our philosophic historians take no account of these

things, nor of the fact that history shows them no barbaric

ancestors of the Egyptians, Indians, Assyrians, Babylon-

ians, Syrians, Phoenicians, etc. They find, or think they

find, from the Greek poets and tradition, that the ances-

tors of the Greeks and Romans, each a comparatively mod-

ern people, were really savages, and that suffices them to

prove that the savage state is the primeval state of the race!

They find, also, that a marvellous progress in civilization,

under Christianity has been effected, and what hinders

them from concluding that man is naturally progressive, or 

that the savage is able, by his own efforts, to lift himself

into civilized life? Have not the northern barbarians, who

overthrew the Roman empire of the west, and seated them-

selves on its majestic ruins, become, under the teachings

and the supernatural influences of the church, the great civ-

ilized nations of the modern world? How, then, pretend

to deny that barbarians and savages can become civilized by

their own spontaneous efforts and natural forces alone?

Whether any savage tribe was ever civilized under gen-

tilism is, perhaps, doubtful; but if the philosophers of

history would take the right line, instead of a collateral

line or bastard branch of the human family, and follow it

from Adam down, through the patriarchs, the synagogue,

and the Catholic Church, they would find that there has

always been a believing, a faithful, an enlightened, and

a civilized people on earth, and they never would and

never could have imagined any thing so untrue as

that man began "in the lowest form of barbarism in

which he can subsist as man." We have no indication of

the existence of any savage or barbarous tribe before the

flood; nor after the flood, till the confusion of language at

Babel, and the consequent dispersion of the human race;

that is, till after the gentile apostasy, of which they are one

of the fruits. Adam, by his fall, lost communion with

God, became darkened in his understanding, enfeebled in

his will, and disordered in his appetites and passions; but

he did not lose all his science, forgot all his moral and re-

ligious instruction, and become a complete savage. Besides,

his communion with God was renewed by repentance and

faith in the promised Messiah, or incarnate Son of God,

who should some to redeem the world, and enable man to

fulfil his destiny, or attain to his end.

We do not by any means deny progress. We believe in

it with St. Paul, and struggle for it in individuals and in 

society. We only do not believe in progress or perfectibil-

ity by the simple forces of nature alone, or that man is nat-

urally progressive. Existences have two movements or

cycles: the one, their procession, by way of creation, from

God as first cause; the other, their return, without absorption

in him, to God as their final cause or beatitude, as we have

on several occasions very fully shown. In the first cycle,

man is explicated by natural generation, and his powers are

determined by his nature, or the physical laws of his exist-

ence. In the second cycle, his explication is by regenera-

tion, a supernatural act; and his progress is directed and

controlled by the moral law prescribed by God as final

cause, and is limited only by the infinite, to which he as-

pires and, by the assistance of grace, may attain. The first

cycle is initial; and in it there is no moral, religious, or 

social progress; there is only physical development and

growth. It is under the natural laws of the physicists, who

never look any further. The second cycle is teleological,

and under the moral law, or the natural law of the theolo-

gians and the legists. In this teleological cycle lies the

whole moral order, as distinguished from the physical; the

whole of religion; its means, influences, and ends; and,

consequently, civilization, in so far as it has any moral or re-

ligious character, aims, or tendency.

Civilization, we are aware, is a word that has hardly a

fixed meaning, and is used vaguely, and in different senses.

It is derived from a word signifying the city--in modern lan-

guage, the state--and relates to the organization, constitu-

tion, and administration of the commonwealth or republic.

It is used vaguely for the aggregate of the manners, cus-

toms, and usages of city life, and also for the principles and

laws of a well-ordered and well-groverned civil society. We 

take it chiefly in the latter sense, and understand by it the

supremacy of the moral order in secular life, the reign of

law,or the subjection of the passions and turbulent ele-

ments of human nature in the individual, the family, and

society to the moral law; or, briefly, the predominance of

reason and justice over passion and caprice in the affairs of

this world, and therefore coincident with liberty, as distin-

guished from license. The race began in civilization, be-

cause it began with a knowledge of the law of human ex-

istence, man's origin and destiny, and of the means and

conditions of gaining the end for which he exists; and be-

cause he was placed in the outset by his Maker in posses- 

sion of these means and conditions, so that he could not

fail except through his own fault. Those who reject, neg-

lect, or pervert the moral order, follow only the natural

laws, separate from the communion of the faithful, and re-

main in the initial cycle, gradually become barbarians, su-

perstitious, the slaves of their own passions, cruel and mer-

ciless savages, even if still cultivated, refined, and mild-

mannered.

We place civilization, then, in the second cycle or move=

ment of existences, under the moral law, and must do so or 

deny it all moral basis or moral character. What is not

moral in its aims and tendencies, or is not in the order of

man's return to God as his last end, we exclude from civil-

ization, as no part of it, even if called by its name. There

is no civilization where there is no state or civil polity; and

there can be no state or civil polity, though there may be

force, tyranny, and slavery, out of the moral order. The

state lies in the moral or teleological order, and is under the

moral law--the law prescribed by God as final cause. It

derives all its principles from it, and is founded and gov-

erned by it. Its very mission is the maintenance of justice,

freedom, and order; and, as far as it goes, to keep men's

faces towards the end for which they are created. And

hence the concord there is, or should be, between the state

and the church.

Most of those things, it will be seen from this, after

which the gentiles seek, and which the moderns call civil-

ization, may be adjuncts of civilization, in the sense of our

Lord, when he says, "Seek first the kingdom of God and

his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you;"

but they do not constitute civilization, are not it, nor any

part of it. Here is where modern gentilism errs, no less

than did the ancient. Take up any of the leading journals

of the day, and you will find what with great emphasis is

called modern civilization is in the initial order, not the tel-

eological; and is only a development and application of the

natural laws of the physicists, not the natural or moral law

of the theologians and legists. The press and popular ora-

tors called, a few years ago, Cyrus W. Field, who had taken

a leading share in laying a submarine telegraph from the

western coast of Ireland to the eastern coast of Newfound-

land, a "second Messiah." When, after much urging and

some threats, President Lincoln proclaimed, as a war meas-

ure, the emancipation of the slaves in certain states and 

parts of states then at war with the general government,

the press and orators that approved, both at home and

abroad, forthwith pronounced him also a "second Messiah,"

and without stopping to inquire whether the emancipation

would be any thing more than the exchange of one form of

compulsory physical labor for another, perhaps no better.

Now, when a new Atlantic cable is laid from France to

Massachusetts, we are told in flaring capitals and lofty peri-

ods that it is another and a glorious triumph of modern civ-

ilization--of mind over matter, man over nature. If our

San Francisco friend succeeds in constructing an aerial ship,

with which he can navigate the air, it will be a greater tri-

umph still of modern civilization, and the theologians and

moralists will have to hide their heads. All this shows that

civilization, by the leaders of public opinion in our day, is

placed wholly in the physical order, and consists in the de-

velopment and application of the natural laws to the ac-

complishment of certain physical ends or purposes of util-

ity only in the first cycle of our existence, and without the

least moral significance. So completely have we become

devoted to the improvement of our condition in the initial

order, that we forget that life does not end with it, or that

the initial exists only for the teleological, and that our de-

velopment and application of the physical laws of nature 

imply no progress in civilization, or the realization of a 

moral ideal.

But whatever success we may have in developing and ap-

plying to our own purposes the physical laws of man and

the globe he inhabits, we must remember that no success of

that sort initiates us into the second cycle, or the life of our

return to God. To enter that life we must be regenerated,

and we can no more regenerate than we can generate our-

selves. Here, we may see why even to civilization the in-

carnation of the Word is necessary. The hypostatic union

of the divine and human natures in the divine person of

the Word carries the creative act to its summit, completes

the first cycle, and initiates the second, into which we can

enter only as we are reborn to Christ, as we were born in

the first cycle of Adam. Hence, Christ is called the second

Adam, the Lord from heaven. Civilization, morality, sal-

vation, are in one sense in the same order and under one

and the same law.

Progress being possible, except in the sense of physical

development, only in the movement of return to God as

final cause, and that movement originating in the Incarna-

tion only, it follows that those nations alone that are united

to Christ by faith and love, either united to him who was

to come, as were the patriarchs and the synagogue, before

the Incarnation, or to him in the church or the regenera-

tion, as are Catholics since, are or can be progressive, or

even truly civilized nations. They who assert progress by

our natural forces alone, confound the first cycle with the

second, generation with regeneration, and the natural laws,

which proceed from God as first cause, with the natural or

moral law which is prescribed by God as final cause. It is

a great mistake, then, to suppose, as many do, that the mys-

teries of faith, even the most recondite, have no practical

bearing on the progress of men and nations, or that it is

safe, in studying civilization, to take our point of departure

in gentilism.

In accordance with our conclusion, we find that gentile

nations, ancient or modern, are really unprogressive, save in

the physical or initial order; which is of no account in the

moral or teleological order. We deny not the achievements

of Protestant nations in the physical order; but, in relation

to the end for which man exists, they not only do not ad-

vance beyond what they took with them from the church,

but are constantly deteriorating. They have lost the condi-

tion of moral and spiritual progress, individually and col-

lectively, by losing communion with Christ in his church;

they have lost Christ, in reality, if not in name; and by

losing the infallible word preserved by the church alone,

they have lost or are losing the state, civil authority itself,

and finding themselves reduced to what St. Paul calls "the

natural man." They place all their hopes in physical suc-

cess, always certain to fail in the end, when pursued for its

own sake. 

We have raised and we raise here no questions as to what

God might have done, or how or with what powers he might

have created man, had he chosen. We only take the plan 

he has chosen to adopt; and which, in his providence and

grace, he carries out. In the present decree, as say the

theologians, he was subjected the whole teleological order to

one and the same law; and civilization, morality, and Chris-

tian sanctity are not separable in principle, and depend on

one and the same fundamental law. Gentilism divorces re-

ligion and the state from morality; and modern heresy rec-

ognizes no intrinsic relation between them. It tells us re- 

ligion is necessary to the stability of the political order;

that Christianity is the basis of morality, and that it is the

great agent of progress; but it shows us no reason why it is

or should be so, and in its practical doctrine it teaches that

it is not so. Every thing, as far as it informs us, depends

on arbitrary appointment, and without any reason of being

in the system of things which God has seen proper to cre-

ate. Hence, people are unable to form to themselves any

clear view of the relation of religion and morality, of mo-

rality and civilization, or to arrive at any satisfactory under-

standing of the purpose and law of human existence; and

they either frame to themselves the wildest, the most fanci-

ful, or the most absurd theories, or give the whole up in de-

spair, sink into a state of utter indifference, and say, "Let

us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." They simply veg-

etate in vice or crime, or, at best, only take themselves to

the study of the physical sciences, or the cultivation of the

fine arts. We have shown that their difficulties and dis-

couragements are imaginary, and arise from ignorance of

the divine plan of creation, and the mutual relation and de-

pendence of all its parts. One divine thought runs through

the whole, and nothing does or can stand alone. We study

things too much in their analysis, not enough in their syn-

thesis.