The Catholic World, Vol. 06, October, 1867 to March, 1868.

Under the head Rome or Reason we showed in THE CATHOLIC WORLD for last month that Catholicity is based on reality, and is the synthesis, so to speak, of Creator and creature, of God and man, of heaven and earth, nature and grace, faith and reason, authority and liberty, revelation and science, and that there is in the real order no antagonism between the two terms or categories. The supposed antagonism results from not understanding the real nexus that unites them in one dialectic whole, and forms the ground of their mutual conciliation and peace, expressed in the old sense of the word atonement.
Christianity is supernatural, indeed, but it is not an after-thought, or an anomaly in the original plan of creation. Our Lord was the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world; the Incarnation is included in creation as its completion or fulfilment; and hence many theologians hold that, even if man had not sinned, God would have become incarnate, not, indeed, to redeem man from sin and death which comes by sin, but to ennoble his nature, and to enable him to attain to that supernatural union with God in which alone he finds or can find his supreme good or perfect beatitude. Christianity, whether this be so or not, must always be regarded as teleological, the religion of the end—not accidentally so, but made so in the original plan of the Creator. It enters dialectically, not arbitrarily, into that plan, and really completes it. In this view of the case the Creator's works from first to last are dialectical, and there is and can be no contradiction in them; no discrepancy between the natural and supernatural, between faith and reason, nature and grace, the beginning, medium, and end, but all form integral parts of one indissoluble whole.
But, if there is and can be no antagonism between Rome and Reason, there certainly is an antagonism between Rome and the World, which must not be overlooked or counted for nothing, and which will, in some form, most likely, subsist as long as the world stands. Rome symbolizes for us the catholic religion, or the divine order, which is the law of life. The Catholic Church in its present state dates only from the Incarnation, out of which it grows, and of which it is in some sort the visible continuation; but the Catholic religion, as the faith, as the law of life, dates from the beginning. The just before the coming of Christ were just on the same principles, by the same faith, and by obedience to the same divine law, or conformity to the same divine order, that they are now, and will be to the end; and hence the deist Tindal expressed a truth which he was far from comprehending when he asserted that Christianity is as old as the world. Tindal's great error was in understanding by Christianity only the natural law promulgated through natural reason, and in denying the supernatural. Christianity is that and more too. It includes, and from the first has included, in their synthesis, both the natural and the supernatural. The human race has never had but one true or real religion, but one revelation, which, as St. Thomas teaches, was made in substance to our first parents in the garden. Times change, says St. Augustine, but faith changes not. As believed the fathers—the patriarchs—so believe we, only they believed in a Christ to come, and we in a Christ that has come. Prior to the actual coming of Christ the Church existed, but in a state of promise, and needed his actual coming to be perfected, or fulfilled, as St. Paul teaches us in his epistle to the Hebrews; and hence none who died before the Incarnation actually entered heaven till after the passion of our Lord.