They who oppose the church in the name of humanity or human progress, cannot succeed, because she is indivisible, and they would utterly defeat themselves if they could. They would deprive the human race of the law of God, which makes wise the simple and strengthens the weak, and deprive men and nations of the truth and reality of things, the very principle of all life, and of the very means and conditions of all progress. Man no doubt is progressive, but not in and by himself alone. Archimedes demanded a pou sto, a whereon to rest his fulcrum outside the earth, in order to move it, and there is no conceivable way by which a man can raise himself by a lever supported on himself. How is it that our philosophers fail to see the universal application of the laws which they themselves assert? All progress is by assimilation, by accretion, as that hierophant of progress, Pierre Leroux, has amply demonstrated, and if there is no reality outside of man or above him, what is there for him to assimilate, and how is he to become more than at any given time he already is? Swift ridiculed the philosophers of Laputa, who labored to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, but even more ridiculous are they who pretend that something may be assimilated from nothing, or that a thing can in and of itself make itself more than it is. Where there is nothing above man with which he does or may commune, there is for him no possibility of progress, and men and nations can never advance beyond what they are. This is so in the nature of things, and it is only what is implied in the maxim, Ex nihilo nihil fit.
An institution, no matter by what sacred name called, founded by savages, embodying only what they are, and worked by them, would have no power to elevate them above their savage state, and could only serve to perpetuate their savagery. The age speaks of the applications of science to the productive arts, of the marvels of the steam-engine, steamboats, the locomotive, and the magnetic telegraph, and boasts that it renders mind omnipotent over matter. Vain boast, poor philosophy. We have in those things gained no triumph over matter, no control over the forces of nature, which are as independent of our reason and will as ever they were, as the first steamboat explosion will suffice to convince the most skeptical. We have subjected none of the forces of nature; we have only learned in some few instances to construct our machinery so as to be propelled by them, as did the first man who built a mill, constructed a boat, or spread his sails to catch the breeze. We alter not, we control not by our machinery the forces of nature, and all the advantage we have obtained is in conforming to them, and in suffering them, according to their own laws, or laws which we have not imposed on them, to operate for us. The principle is universal, catholic, and as true in the moral or spiritual as in the mechanical or physical world.
Man does not create, generate, or control the great moral and spiritual forces on which he depends to propel his moral and spiritual machinery. They exist and operate independently alike of his reason and his will, and the advantages he derives from them are obtained by his placing himself within the sphere of their influence, or, to be strictly correct, by interposing voluntarily no obstacle to their inflowing, for they are always present and operative unless resisted. Withdraw him from their influence, or induce him obstinately to resist them, which he may do, for he is a free moral agent, and he can make no more progress than a sailing ship at sea in a dead calm. These forces are divine, are embodied in the church as her living and constitutive force—are in one sense the church herself, and hence men and nations separated from her communion and influence are thrown back on nature alone, and necessarily cease to be progressive. We may war against this as much as we please, but we cannot alter it, for the principle on which it rests is a universal and indestructible law.
Individuals and nations separated by schism or heresy from the visible communion of the church do not become at once absolutely and in all respects unprogressive, for they are carried on for a time by the momentum she baa given them, and besides, they are not, as she continues to exist, absolutely beyond or outside of the sphere of her influence, though indirect and reflected. But from the moment of the separation their progress begins to slacken, their spiritual life becomes sickly and attenuated, and gradually they lose all that they had received from the church, and lapse into helpless and unassisted nature. This, which is demonstrable à priori, is proved by the experience of those nations that separated from the church in the sixteenth century. These nations at first retained a large portion of their old Catholic culture, and many of the habits acquired under the discipline and training of the church. But they have been gradually losing them ever since, and the more advanced portions of them have got pretty clear of them, and thrown off, as they express it, the last rag of Popery. Indeed this is their boast.
In throwing off the authority of the church, they came in religious matters under the authority of the state, or the temporal sovereign or ruler—a purely human authority, without competency in spirituals—and thus lost at once their entire religious freedom, or liberty of conscience. In Catholic nations the civil authority has always, or almost always, been prone to encroach on the authority of the church, and to attempt to control her external discipline or ecclesiastical administration; but, in the nations that were carried away by the so-called reformation, the civil authority assumed in every instance complete control over the national church, and prescribed its constitution, its creed, its liturgy, and its discipline. This for them completely humanized religion, and made it a department of state. It is true these nations professed to recognize the Bible as containing a divine revelation, and to be governed by it; and this would have been something, even much, had they not remitted its interpretation to the civil magistrate, the king, the parliament, the public judgment of the people, or the private judgment of the individual, which made its meeting, as practically received, vary from nation to nation, and even from individual to individual.
This sacrificed, in principle, the sovereignty of God and the entire spiritual order, departed to a fearful distance from the truth and reality of things, and if it retained some of the precepts of the Christian law, it retained them as precepts not of the law of God but as precepts of the law of man, enjoined, explained, and applied by a purely human authority. In process of time, the authority of the state in religious matters was found to be usurped, tyrannical, and oppressive, and the thinking part of the separated nations asserted the right of private judgment, or of each believer to interpret the Holy Scriptures for himself. Having gone thus far, they went still farther, and assert for everyone the right to judge for himself not only of the meaning, but of the inspiration, authenticity, and authority of the Scriptures, though the civil government in none of these nations, except the United States, not in existence at the time of the separation, has disavowed its authority in spirituals. Practically, the doctrine that each individual judges for himself is now generally adopted.
The authority of the Scriptures has followed the authority of the church, and is practically, when not theoretically, rejected. It was perhaps asserted by the reformers at first for the purpose of presenting some authority not precisely human, which no Catholic would deny, as offset against that of the church, rather than from any deep reverence for it, or profound conviction of it« reality. But, be this as it may, it counts for little now. The authors of Essays and Reviews, and the Anglican bishop of Natal, take hardly less liberty with the [{57}] Scriptures than Luther and Calvin did with the church. The more advanced thinkers, if thinkers they are, of the age go further still, and maintain not only that a man may be a very religious man, and a true follower of Jesus Christ, without accepting either the authority of the church or that of the Bible, but without even believing either in the existence of God or the immortality of the soul. Schleiermacher, the great Berlin preacher, went thus far in his Discourses on Religion, addressed to the Cultivated among its Despisers; and equally far, if not farther, in the same direction, go the rising school or sect called Positivists. Religion is reduced to a spontaneous development—perhaps I should say, to a secretion of human nature, implying no reality above or distinguishable from human nature itself.
It is not pretended that all persons in these nations have as yet reached this result; but as there is a certain logic in error as well as in truth, all are tending and must tend to it. What is called progress of religious ideas or religious enlightenment is not held to consist in any accession to our stock of known truth, in penetrating farther into the world of reality, and attaining a firmer grasp of its principles, nor in a better understanding of our moral relations and the duties growing out of them, but in simply casting off or getting rid of so-called Popery—of everything that has been retained in the nations, and the sects into which they divide and subdivide, furnished by the Catholic Church in which the reformers had been reared, and in reducing men and nations to the nakedness and feebleness of nature. The more advanced portion are already seen sporting in puris naturalibus, heedless alike of shame and winter's cold. The others are following more or less rapidly in the same direction; for there is no halting-place between Catholicity and naked naturalism, and men must either ascend to the one or descend to the other. But those who choose to descend can find no resting-place even in naturalism, for nature, severed from Catholicity, is severed from its principle, is severed from God, from the reality and truth of things, and is therefore unreal, nothing, Hence the descent is endless. Falsehood has no bottom, is unreal, purely negative, and can furnish no standing. Men can stand only on the true, the real, and that is Catholicity, the order represented in society by the church. Those who forsake the church, Catholicity, God, forsake therefore the real order, have nothing to stand on, and in the nature of the case can only drop into what the Scripture calls "the bottomless pit."
We hear much of the ignorance, superstition, and even of idolatry of Catholics, nothing of which is true; but this much is certain, that those who abandon the church, and succeed in humanizing religion, making it hold from man and subject to his control, do as really worship gods of their fashioning as did the old worshippers of gods made of wood and stone, because their religion is really only what they make it, and fall into as gross an idolatry and into as besotted and besotting a superstition as can be found among any heathen people, ancient or modern.