The numbers who embrace in their fullest extent the extreme views we have set forth, though greater than it is pleasant to believe, are yet not great enough to give of themselves any serious alarm, and hence many able and well-meaning men who have not the least sympathy with them attach no great importance to them, and treat them with superb contempt; but they are in reality only the advance-guard of a much larger and more formidable body, who march under the same drapeau and adopt the same counter-sign. The Archbishop of Westminster, than whom we can hardly name an abler or more enlightened prelate in the church, has said truly in a late Pastoral,
"That the age of heresies is past. No one now dreams of revising the teaching of the church, or of making a new form of Christianity. For this the age is too resolute and consistent. Faith or unbelief is an intelligible alternative; but between variations and fragments of Christianity men have no care to choose. All or none is clear and consistent; but more or less is halting and undecided. Revelation is a perfect whole, pervaded throughout by the veracity and authority of God, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. To reject any of it is to reject the whole law of divine faith; to criticise it and to remodel it is to erect the human reason as judge and measure of the divine. And such is heresy; an intellectual aberration which in these last ages has been carried to its final analysis, and exposed not only by the theology of the church but by the common sense of rationalism. We may look for prolific and antichristian errors in abundance, but heresies in Christianity are out of date."
The great body of those outside of the Catholic communion, as well as some nominally in it, but not of it, who are still attached to the Christian name, adopt the watchwords of the extreme party, and are tending in the same direction. Mazzini and Garibaldi are heroes with the mass of Englishmen and Americans, who wish them success in their anti-religious and anti-social movements. The universal secular press, the great power in modern society, with the whole sectarian press, has applauded the nefarious measures of intriguing Italian statesmen, demagogues, and apostates by which the Holy Father has been stripped of the greater part of his temporal possessions, the church despoiled of her goods, religious houses suppressed, and the freedom and independence of religion abolished throughout the Italian peninsula. The only non-Catholic voice we have heard raised in sympathy with the pope is that of Guizot, the ex-premier of Louis Philippe. Guizot, though a Protestant, sees that the papacy is essential to the Catholic Church, and that the Catholic Church is essential to the preservation of Christian civilization, the maintenance of society and social order. Our own secular press, so loud in its praise of religious liberty, applauds the Mexican Juarez for his confiscation of the goods of the church in the poor, distracted republic of Mexico. The sympathy of the world, of the age, is with every movement that tends to weaken the power of the church, the authority of religion, and even the authority of the state. The tendency with great masses who believe themselves Christians, a blind tendency it may be, is to no-religion or infidelity, and to no-governmentism. It is this fact that constitutes the danger to be combated.
The difficulty of combating it is very great. The mass of the people are caught by words without taking note of the meaning attached to them. Where they find the consecrated terms of faith and piety, they naturally conclude that faith and piety are there. But to a great extent the enemies of Christianity oppose Christianity under Christian names. It is characteristic of this age that infidelity disguises itself in a Christian garb, and utters its blasphemy in Christian phraseology, its falsehoods in the language of truth. Satan disguises himself as an angel of light, comes as a philanthropist, talks of humanity, professes to be the champion of science, intelligence, education, liberty, progress, social amelioration, and the moral, intellectual, and physical elevation of the poorer and more numerous classes—all good things, when rightly understood, and in their time and place. We cannot oppose him without seeming to many to oppose what is a Christian duty. If we oppose false intelligence, we are immediately accused of being opposed to intelligence; if we oppose a corrupt and baneful education, we are accused of being in favor of popular ignorance, and lovers of darkness; if we oppose false liberty, or license presented under the name of liberty, we are charged with being the enemies of true freedom; if we assert authority, however legitimate or necessary, then we are despots and the advocates of despotism. The press opens its cry against us, and the age votes us mediaeval dreamers, behind the times, relics of the past, with our eyes on the backside of our heads, and the truth is drowned in the floods of indignation or ridicule poured out against us. Our success would be hopeless, if we could not rely on the support of Him whose cause we seek to the best of our ability to defend, and who after all reigneth in the heavens, and is able to make the wrath of man praise him, and can overrule evil for good.
It is alleged that the church opposes democracy, and is leagued with the despots against the people. The church herself leagues neither with democracy nor with monarchy. She leaves the people free to adopt the form of government they prefer. She opposes movements pretendedly in favor of democracy only when they are in violation of social order and opposed to legitimate authority, and she supports monarchy only where monarchy is the law, and it is necessary to uphold it as the condition of maintaining social order, and saving civilization from the barbarism that threatens to invade it. In the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century the contrary charge was preferred, and the Church was condemned by the world on the ground of being hostile to kingly government; for public opinion then favored absolute monarchy, as it does now absolute democracy. We believe our own form of government the best for us, but we dare not say that other forms of government are not the best for other nations. Despotism is never legitimate; but we know no law of God or nature that makes democracy obligatory upon every people, and no reason for supposing that real liberty keeps pace with the progress of democracy. Democracy did not save France from the Reign of Terror and the most odious tyranny, and it certainly has not secured liberty and good order in Mexico. With us it is yet an experiment and we can pronounce nothing with certainty till we have seen the result of the crisis we are now passing through. We owe to it a fearful civil war and the suppression of a formidable rebellion, but the end is not yet. Still, there is nothing in our form of government in discord with the Catholic Church, and we firmly believe that, if maintained in its purity and integrity, she would find under it a freer field for her exertions than has ever yet been afforded her in the Old World. At any rate, there is no room for doubt that the country needs the church to sustain our political institutions, and to secure their free and beneficial workings.
But the world does not gain what it seeks. It does not gain inward freedom, freedom of soul and of thought. It is difficult to conceive a worse bondage than he endures who feels that for truth and goodness he has no dependence but himself. One wants something on which to rest, something firm and immovable, and no bondage is more painful than the feeling that we stand on an insecure foundation, ready to give way under us if we seek to rest our whole weight on it, and that our constructions, however ingenious, can stand only as we uphold them with might and main. The man with only himself for support, is Atlas bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders in a treadmill. He is a man, as we know by experience, crossing a deep and broad river on floating cakes of ice, each too small to bear his weight, and sinking as soon as he strikes it. He must constantly keep springing from one to another to save his life, and yet, however rapidly he springs, gains nothing more solid or less movable. The world in its wisdom is just agoing to get on to something on which it can stand and rest, but it never does. Its castles are built in the air, and it spends all its labor for naught. All its efforts defeat themselves. Its philanthropy aggravates the evils it would redress, or creates others that are greater and less easily cured. In seeking mental freedom, it takes from the mind the light without which it cannot operate; in seeking freedom from the king, it falls under the tyranny of the mob; and, to get rid of the tyranny of the mob falls under that of the military despot; disdaining heaven, it loses the earth; refusing to obey God, it loses man.
All history, all experience proves it. Having rejected the sacredness and inviolability of authority in both religion and politics, and asserted "the sacred right of insurrection," the world finds itself without religion, without faith, without social order, in the midst of perpetual revolutions, checked or suppressed only by large standing armies, while each nation is overwhelmed with a public debt that is frightful to contemplate. This need not surprise us. It is the truth that liberates or makes free, and when truth is denied, or resolved into each one's own opinion or mental conception, there is nothing to liberate the mind from its illusions and to sustain its freedom. The mind pines away and dies without truth, as the body without food. It was said by one who spake as never man spake, that he who would save his life shall lose it, and experience proves that they who seek this world never gain it. "Ye shall not eat thereof, nor touch it, lest ye die." This command, which Satan contradicts, is true and good, and obedience to it is the only condition of life, or real success in life. In seeking to be God, man becomes less than man, because he denies the truth and reality of things. It is very pleasant, says Heinrich Heine, to think one's self a god, but it costs too much to keep up the dignity and majesty of one's godship. Our resources are not equal to it, and purse and health give way under the effort. Falsehood yields nothing, because it is itself nothing, and is infinitely more expensive than truth. Falsehood has no support, and can give none; whoever leans on it must fall through. And if ever there was a falsehood, it is that man is God, or independent of God.
The whole question between Rome and the world, turn it as we will, comes back always to this: Is man God, or the creature of God? He certainly is not God: then he is a creature, and God has created him and owns him, is his Lord and Master. He, then, is not independent of God, for the creative act of God is as necessary to continue him in existence and to enable him to act, to fulfil his destiny, or to attain his end or supreme good, as it was to call him from nothing into existence. God is the principle, medium, and end of our existence. Separation from God, or independence of him, is death; for we live, and move, and have our being in him, not in ourselves. The universe, when once created, does not go ahead on its own hook or of itself without further creative intervention; for the creative act is not completed in relation to the creature, till the creature has fulfilled its destiny or reached its end. God creates me and at each moment of my existence as much and as truly as he did Adam, and the suspension of his creative act for a single instant would be my annihilation. So of the universe. He creates me, indeed, a second cause and a free moral agent; but even in my own acts or causation I depend on him as my first cause, as the cause of me as a second cause, and in my own sphere I can cause or act only by virtue of his active presence and concurrence. When I attempt to act without him, as if I were independent of him, as our first parents did in following the suggestions of Satan, I do not cease to exist physically, but I die morally and spiritually, lose my moral life, fall into abnormal relations with my Creator, and am spiritually dead; for my moral and spiritual life depends on my voluntary obedience to the law of all created life: "Ye shall not eat thereof, or touch it, lest ye die."
Here is the basis of the divine dominion. God is sovereign lord and proprietor because he is creator, and man and nature are the work of his hands. Hence the Mosaic books insist not only on the unity of God, but even with more emphasis, if possible, on God as creator. The first verse of Genesis asserts creation in opposition to emanation, generation, or formation: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." All through the Old Testament, especially in the hagiographical books and the prophets, there is a perpetual recurrence to God as creator, to the fact that he has made the world and all things therein, and hence the call upon all creatures to sing his praise, so often repeated in the Psalms. Indeed, it was not so much by belief in the unity of God as in the fact that God is sole and universal creator, that the Jews were distinguished from the Gentiles. It may be doubted if the Gentiles ever wholly lost the belief in the existence of one God. We think we find in all heathen mythologies traces of a recognition of one God hovering, so to speak, over their manifold gods and goddesses, who were held to be tutelar divinities, never the divinity itself. But the Gentiles, as we have already said, had lost, and did in no sense admit, the fact of creation. We find no recognition of God as creator in any Gentile philosophy, Indian, Persian, Chaldean, Egyptian, Chinese, Greek, or Roman. The Gentiles were not generally atheists, we suspect not atheists at all; but they were invariably pantheists. Pantheism is the denial of the proper creative act of God, or, strictly speaking, that God creates substances or existences capable of acting from their own centre and producing effects as second causes. The Jews were the only people, after the great Gentile apostasy, that preserved the tradition of creation. God as creator is the basis of all science, all faith, all religion; hence the first article of the Creed: "I believe in one God, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible." In this fact is founded the inviolable right of the Almighty to govern all his works, man among the rest, as seems to him good. We cannot deny this if we once admit the fact of creation; and if we deny the fact of creation, we deny our own existence and that of the entire universe.