But suppose that he has not settled in his own mind his meaning on this point, as is most likely the case; that he has not asked himself whether man on the earth has a beginning or an end, and that he regards the race as a natural evolution, revolving always in the same circle, and takes, therefore, the infancy he speaks of as the infancy of a nation or a given community. Then his doctrine is, that the earliest stage of every civilized nation or community is the savage state, that the ancestors of the civilized in every age are savages, and that all civilization has been developed under the control of physical conditions from the savage state. The germ of all civilization then must be in the savage, and civilization then must be evolved from the savage as the chicken from the egg, or the egg from the sperm. But of this there is no evidence; for, as we have seen, there is no nation known that has sprung from exclusively savage ancestors, no known instance of a savage people developing, if we may so speak, into a civilized people. The theory rests on no historical or scientific basis, and is perfectly gratuitous. In the savage state we detect reminiscences of a past civilization, not the germs of a future civilization, or if germs—germs that are dead, and that never do or can germinate. There are degrees of civilization; people may be more or less civilized; but we have no evidence, historical or scientific, of a time when there was no civilized people extant. There are civilized nations now, and contemporary with them are various savage tribes, and the same may be said of every epoch since history began. The civilized nations whose origin we know have all sprung from races more or less civilized, never from purely savage tribes. The physiologists overlook history, and mistake the evening twilight for the dawn.
But pass over this. Let us come to the doctrine for which the professor writes his book, namely, individuals, communities, nations, universal humanity, are under the control of physical conditions, therefore of physical law, or law in the sense of the physiologists or the physicists. If this means anything, it means that the religion, the morality, the intellectual development, the growth and decay, the littleness and the grandeur of men and nations depend solely on physical causes, not at all on moral causes—a doctrine not true throughout even in human physiology, and supported by no facts, except in a very restricted degree, when applied to nations and communities. In the corporeal phenomena of the individual the soul counts for much, and in morbid physiology the moral often counts for more than the physical; perhaps it always does, for we know from revelation that the morbidity of nature is the penalty or effect of man's transgression. It is proved to be false as applied to nations and communities by the fact that the Christian religion, which is substantially that of the ancient patriarchs, is, at least as far as science can go, older than any of the false religions, has maintained itself the same in all essential respects, unvaried and invariable, in every variety of physical change, and in every diversity of physical condition, and absolutely unaffected by any natural causes whatever.
The chief physical conditions on which the professor relies are climate and geographical position. Yet what we hold to be the true religion, the primitive religion of mankind, has prevailed in all climates, and been found the same in all geographical positions. Nay, even the false pagan religions have varied only in their accidents with climatic and geographical positions. We find them in substance the same in India, Central Asia, on the banks of the Danube, in the heart of Europe, in the ancient Scania, the Northern Isles, in Mexico and Peru. The substance of Greek and Roman or Etrurian mythology is the same with that of India and Egypt. M. Rénan tells us that the monotheism so firmly held by the Arabic branch of the Semitic family, is due to the vast deserts over which the Arab tribes wander, which suggest the ideas of unity and universality; and yet for centuries before Mohammed, these same Arabs, wandering over the same deserts, were polytheists and idolaters; and not from contemplating those deserts, but by recalling the primitive traditions of mankind, preserved by Jews and Christians, did the founder of Islamism attain to the monotheism of the Koran. The professor is misled by taking, in the heathen mythology he has studied, the poetic imagery and embellishments, which indeed vary according to the natural aspects, objects, and productions of the locality, for their substance, thought, or doctrine. The poetic illustrations, imagery, and embellishments of Judaism are all oriental; but the Jew in all climates and in all geographical positions holds one and the same religious faith even to this day; and his only real difference from us is, that he is still looking for a Christ to come, while we believe the Christ he is looking for has come, and is the same Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified at Jerusalem, under Pontius Pilate.
We know the author contends that there has been from the beginning a radical difference between the Christianity of the East and that of the West; but we know that such is not and never has been the fact. The great Eastern fathers and theologians are held in as high honor in Western Christendom as they ever were in Eastern Christendom. Nearly all the great councils that defined the dogmas held by the Catholic Church throughout the whole world were held in the East. The Greeks were more speculative and more addicted to philosophical subtleties and refinements than the Latins, and therefore more liable to originate heresies; but nowhere was heresy more vigorously combated, or the one faith of the universal church more ably, more intelligently, or more fervently defended than in the East, before the Emperors and the Bishop of Constantinople drew the Eastern Church, or the larger part of it, into schism. But the united Greek Church, the real Eastern Church, the church of St. Athanasius, of the Basils, and the Gregories, is one in spirit, one in faith, one in communion with the Church of the West.
The author gravely tells us that Christianity had three primitive forms, the Judaical, which has ended; the Gnostic, which has also ended; the African, which still continues. But he has no authority for what he says. Some Jewish observances were retained for a time by Christians of Jewish origin, till the synagogue could be buried with honor; but there never was a Jewish form of Christianity, except among heretics, different from the Christianity still held by the church. There are some phrases in the Gospel of St. John, and in the Epistles of St. Paul that have been thought to be directed against the gnostics; and Clemens of Alexandria writes a work in which he uses the terms gnosis, knowledge, and gnostic, a man possessing knowledge or spiritual science, in a good sense; but, we suspect, with a design of rescuing these from the bad sense in which they were beginning to be used, as some of our European friends are trying to do with the terms liberal and liberalist. Nevertheless, what Clemens defends under these terms is held by Catholics to-day in the same sense in which he defends it. There never was an African form of Christianity distinct from the Christianity either of Europe or Asia. The two great theologians of Africa are St. Cyprian and St. Augustine, both probably of Roman, or, at least, of Italian extraction. The doctrine which St. Cyprian is said to have maintained on baptism administered by heretics, the only matter on which he differed from Rome, has never been, and is not now, the doctrine of the church. St. Augustine was converted in Milan, and had St. Ambrose, a Roman, for his master, and differed from the theologians either of the East or the West only in the unmatched ability and science with which he defended the faith common to all. He may have had some peculiar notions on some points, but if so, these have never been received as Catholic doctrine.
The professor might as well assert the distinction, asserted in Germany a few years since, which attracted some attention at the time, but now forgotten, between the Petrine gospel, the Pauline gospel, and the Joannine gospel, as the distinction of the three primitive forms of Christianity which he asserts. We were told by some learned German, we forget his name, that Peter, Paul, and John represent three different phases or successive forms of Christianity. The Petrine gospel represents religion, based on authority; the Pauline, religion as based on intelligence; and the Joannine, religion as based on love. The first was the so-called Catholic or Roman Church. The reformation made an end of that, and ushered in the Pauline form, or Protestantism, the religion of the intellect. Philosophy, science. Biblical criticism, and exegesis, the growth of liberal ideas, and the development of the sentiments and affections of the heart, have made an end of Protestantism, and are ushering in the Joannine gospel, the religion of love, which is never to be superseded or to pass away. The advocate of this theory had got beyond authority and intelligence, whether he had attained to the religion of love or not; yet the theory was only the revival of the well-known heresy of the Eternal Evangel of the thirteenth century. So hard is it to invent a new heresy. It were a waste of words to attempt to show that this theory has not the slightest foundation in fact. Paul and John assert authority as strenuously as Peter; Peter and John give as free scope to the intellect as Paul; and Peter and Paul agree with John in regard to love or charity. There is nothing in the Gospel or Epistles of John to surpass the burning love revealed, we might almost say concealed, so unostentatious is it, by the inflamed Epistles of Paul. As for Protestantism, silence best becomes it, when there is speech of intelligence, so remarkable is it for its illogical and unintellectual character. Protestants have their share of native intellect, and the ordinary degree of intelligence on many subjects; but in the science of theology, the basis of all the sciences, and without which there is, and can be, no real science, they have never yet excelled.
Nor did the reformation put an end to the so-called Petrine gospel, the religion of authority, the church founded on Peter, prince of the apostles. It may be that Protestantism is losing what little intellectual character it once had, and developing in a vague philanthropy, a watery sentimentality, or a blind fanaticism, sometimes called Methodism, sometimes Evangelicalism; but Peter still teaches and governs in his successor. The Catholic Church has survived the attacks of the reformation and the later revolution, as she survived the attacks of the persecuting Jews and pagans, and the power and craft of civil tyrants who sought to destroy or to enslave her, and is to-day the only religion that advances by personal conviction and conversion. Mohammedanism can no longer propagate itself even by the sword; the various pagan superstitions have reached their limits, and are recoiling on themselves; and Protestantism has gained no accession of territory or numbers since the death of Luther, except by colonization and the natural increase of the population then Protestant. The Catholic Church is not only a living religion, but the only living religion, the only religion that does, or can, command the homage of science, reason, free thought, and the uncorrupted affections of the heart. The Catholic religion is at once light, freedom, and love—the religion of authority, of the intellect, and of the heart, embracing in its indissoluble unity Peter, Paul, and John.
The professor's work on the intellectual development of Europe proves that religion in some form has constituted a chief element in that development. It always has been, and still is, the chief element in the life of communities and nations, the spring and centre of intellectual activity and progress. Even the works before us revolve around it, or owe their existence to their relation to it, and would have no intelligible purpose without it. The author has written them to divest religion of its supernatural character, to reduce it to a physiological law, and to prove that it originates in the ignorance of men and nations, and depends solely on physical conditions, chiefly on climate and geographical position. But in this patriarchal, Jewish, Christian religion there is something, and that of no slight influence on the life of individuals and nations, on universal humanity, that flatly contradicts him, that is essentially one and the same from first to last, superior to climate and geographical position, unaffected by natural causes, independent of physical conditions, and in no sense subject to physiological laws. This suffices to refute his theory, and that of the positivists, of whom he is a distinguished disciple; for it proves the uniform presence and activity in the life and development of men and nations, ever since history began, of a power, a being, or cause above nature and independent of nature, and therefore supernatural.
The theory that the rise, growth, decay, and death of nations depend on physical conditions alone, chiefly on climate and geographical position, seems to us attended with some grave difficulties. Have the climate and geographical positions of India, Persia, Assyria, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, essentially changed from what they were at the epoch of their greatness? Did not all the great and renowned nations of antiquity rise, grow, prosper, decline, and die, in substantially the same physical conditions, under the same climate, and in the same geographical position? Like causes produce like effects. How could the same physical causes cause alike the rise and growth, and the decay and death of one and the same people, in one and the same climate, and in one and the same geographical position? Do you say, climate and even physical geography change with the lapse of time? Be it so. Be it as the author maintains, that formerly there was no variation of climate on this continent, from the equator to either pole; but was there for Rome any appreciable change in the climate and geography from the time of the third Punic war to that of Honorius, or even of Augustulus, the last of the Emperors? Or what change in the physical conditions of the nation was there when it was falling from what there was when it was rising?