Now, where in all this, from the first to the last, find you any discrepancy between Rome and Reason, the sovereign church and the free soul, between God in us and God in our masters? There is no discrepancy. There is more in it than natural reason by her own light knows, but nothing against reason, or which reason does not feel that she needs for own full and normal development. There is in it more than there is in nature, because our destiny, our end, that is, our supreme good, like our origin, lies in the supernatural order, not the natural, for our nature can be satisfied with no finite or created good, and it needs no argument to prove that the natural is not capable of itself of attaining to the supernatural. To assert the supernatural as the means of elevating nature to the plane of a supernatural destiny and of enabling it to reach it, assuredly is not to discard or to depress nature.
The difficulties which exclusive rationalists and naturalists feel in the case grow out of their supposition that Rome teaches that the intelligible and superintelligible are identical with the natural and supernatural, and that the natural and supernatural are two separate worlds, each standing opposed to the other, or two contradictory plans or systems, with no real nexus or medium of reconciliation between them, that is, that Rome, saving her authority to teach and govern, teaches Protestantism. The intelligible and superintelligible are distinguishable only in relation to our limited intelligence, but in the real order are identical, one and the same, and would be seen to be so by an intelligence capable of taking in all reality at one view. The natural and supernatural are distinguishable, but not separable, any more than is the effect from the cause. They are simply distinct parts of one complete system, or one dialectic whole, united as well as distinguished by the creative act of God. They are expressed, in the Christian or teleological order, by the terms generation and regeneration. Man is created by the supernatural, but the race is explicated in the order of generation by natural laws; in the order of regeneration, by the election of grace. Generation is initial; regeneration is teleological, and completes generation, or places man on the plane of his end, as generation places the individual on the plane of his natural existence.
Now, it is clear that without generation there can be no regeneration, as without regeneration the end is not attainable. The two terms express two processes, or the two itineraries of creation—the procession of existences from God as First Cause by way of creation and their explication by natural laws, and the return of existences by means of supernatural grace to God, without absorption in him, as their end or Final Cause. The natural order or generation, the order explicated by natural laws, proceeds from and is sustained by the supernatural, for God is supernatural, since he is the author of nature; the end, or the final cause, is supernatural, since it is in God; the medium of return, then, must be also supernatural, since the natural is not and cannot be adequate to a supernatural end. Evidently, then, there is and can be no opposition between the natural and supernatural but the opposition between the cause and effect, the medium and the end, the part and the whole. The supernatural is necessary to originate, sustain, and complete the natural. Hence, the difficulties created or suggested by Protestant theology have no place in relation to the teachings of Rome. Protestantism escapes an eternal war only by supposing either the natural or the supernatural; Rome escapes it by reconciling the two, or presenting in the real order the medium of their union.
We may now dispose of the question of miracles and supernatural visions, etc., which excite the disdain or contempt of Mr. Parkman and his class of thinkers or no-thinkers. Man exists from, by, and for the supernatural. Christianity is supernatural, and is the medium, and the necessary medium, by which man attains his end, or supreme good. It is teleological, and hence the whole teleological life of man is supernatural. The supernatural is that which God does immediately by himself; the natural is that which he does mediately through the action of second causes or so-called natural laws, as generation, germination, growth, etc., which are in the secondary order explicable by natural or created causes. Now, as the supernatural is the origin, medium, and end of man, and as Christianity or the teleological order unites dialectically—really unites, as God and man are really united in the Incarnation—the natural and supernatural, there is and can be no à priori difficulty or antecedent improbability that God, in preparing the introduction in time of the Christian order, and in carrying it on to the end for which he creates it, should intervene more or less frequently by his direct and immediate action—action upon nature, if you will, but without the agency of natural causes. The whole Christian order, on its divine side, though included in the original plan or decree of creation, is an intervention of this sort. Grace is the direct action of God the Holy Ghost in regenerating the human soul, elevating it to the plane of its destiny, and enabling it to persevere to the end. The part assigned to natural agents is ministerial only, or signs through which grace is signified. The direct and immediate action of God is normal in the order of Christianity, and, therefore, in no sense repugnant to the order of nature.
What, then, is a miracle? It is not a violation or suspension of the laws of nature, but a specific effect in the visible order produced by the direct and immediate action of God, for some purpose connected with the teleological order of creation, or the order of regeneration as distinguished from the order of generation. That he should do so from time to time, as seems to him good, is only in analogy with the very order he sustains for the perfection or completion of creation. There are, then, no à priori objections to miracles. Hume's pretence that no testimony can prove a miracle, for it is more probable that men will lie than it is that nature will go out of her course, is of no weight, because nature does not work a miracle, nor does it in a miracle go out of its course. The miracle is worked by God himself, and is in the teleological order of nature. Being wrought in the visible order, a miracle is as probable and as provable as any other historical event. The only questions are, is the event not explicable by natural causes? and are the proofs sufficient to prove it as an historical fact? No more evidence is needed to prove it than is required to prove any historical fact in the natural order itself. If a real miracle, it is as easily proven as a natural event.
No doubt many things pass for miracles which are explicable by natural causes, and many visions are taken to be supernatural which have nothing supernatural about them. We do not hold ourselves bound by our Catholic faith to believe all the marvellous occurrences recorded in the lives of the saints, or treated as such in popular tradition, were really miracles, wrought by the direct and immediate action of the Almighty. We are bound to believe only according to the evidence in each particular case. Credulity is as little the characteristic of Catholics as is scepticism itself. We are in relation to alleged particular miracles as free to exercise our reason and judgment as we are in regard to any other class of alleged historical facts, and to sift and weigh the testimony in the case. That miracles are possible, are not improbable, have never ceased in the church, and are daily wrought among the faithful, we fully believe; but, when it comes to this or that particular fact or event alleged to be a miracle, we exercise to the full our critical judgment, and follow what seems to us the weight of evidence. The alleged appearance of our Lady to the young shepherds of La Salette is possible and not improbable, but before we can be required to believe it we must have sufficient evidence of the fact.
Mr. Parkman in his quiet way smiles at the credulity of the good Jesuit fathers, who seem to believe the stories of Indian magic, witchcraft, or sorcery which they relate; but has he any evidence that there is no Satan, and that evil spirits are mere entia rationis? Can he prove that magic, witchcraft, sorcery, diablerie, in any or all its forms, is impossible or even improbable? All the world from the earliest and in the most enlightened ages have believed in what the Germans call the Night-side of Nature, and no man has any right to allege so universal a belief is unfounded, except on very strong and convincing reasons. Has he such reasons? Can he disprove the whole series of facts recorded? Can he deny the facts alleged by our modern necromancers or spiritists, or prove not that some of them are, but that all of them, are explicable without the supposition of some superhuman agency? Doubtless there is much illusion, delusion, cheatery, but is there not also much inexplicable without satanic influence? Can he say that there is no Satan, that there are no fallen creatures superior to man in strength and intellect, who harass him, beset him, possess him, or that tempt him, and perform lying wonders well fitted to deceive him, and to draw him away from the worship of the true God, though, of course, unable to harm against the consent of his will? Their deviltry is superhuman, but not by any means supernatural, and they who speak of it as supernatural entirely mistake its character. As in the case of miracles, while we concede the general principle, when we come to particular facts attributed to satanic agency, we use our critical judgment, and are, we confess, very slow to believe, and hard to be convinced.
We think we have said enough to prove that it is time to leave off the cant about the despotism of Rome, and to desist from placing the church in contrast with the free soul. The two poles are rationalism and supernaturalism; Catholicity combines both in their real synthesis, a synthesis founded in the creative act of God which really connects creator and creature in one harmonious whole. They who do not perceive it are ignorant of the teachings of Rome, and are mere sciolists. They have taken only superficial views of both reason and religion, and have far more reason to deplore their lack of light than to boast of their intelligence. There is infinitely more in this old church than is dreamed of in their philosophy.
Yet nobody pretends that the church teaches the details of science, and leaves nothing for the human intellect to observe, to investigate, to arrange, and classify. The church is Catholic, because she teaches in her doctrine, whether known by natural reason or only by divine revelation, the universal ideal, or the Catholic principles of all the real and all the knowable; but she does not teach all the details of cosmology, history, chemistry, mechanics, geography, astronomy, geology, zoology, physiology, pathology, philology, or anthropology. She teaches the ideal or general principles of all the sciences, and teaches them infallibly, and thus gives the law to all scientific investigation, which savans in their inductions and deductions are not at liberty to transgress. Our philosophers and savans are perfectly free to explore nature in all possible directions, but they are not free to invent hypotheses and theories not reconcilable with the universal principles she teaches, or to oppose their conjectures to the principles she asserts, because all such conjectures or theories are unscientific and false. The ethnologist is free to investigate the characteristics of the different races and families of men, but not free to deny the unity of the human race itself, or the descent of all men from one and the same primitive pair, who must have been immediately created and instructed by God himself. But this is saying no more than that the mathematician is not free to reject his axioms, or the geometrician his definitions; and we may add that, if our scientific men would take the principles the church teaches as their guide, they would find themselves much more successful in their observation and classification of natural phenomena, and save themselves from the ridicule which they now incur.