Toward this the Protestant mind in England is daily tending with increasing proneness, that portion only excepted which looks upward toward Catholic ritual and dogma. Its presence is more and more apparent among educated men, in Parliament, the universities, the learned professions, the reviews and journals of the day. It is an enemy that meets us in every walk, and is more difficult to grapple with than any definite form of error. It objects not merely to this or that part of our Creed, as Lutheran s and Calvinists did on their first appearing, but it meets us in limine with doubts which pagans would have been ashamed to profess. Even writers on the whole Christian, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, have aided in forming it; but Neology, Strauss, Comte, Mill, Carlyle, Sterling, Hugo, have brought it in like a flood. Mazzini propounds it openly in Macmillan's Magazine, while the Saturday Review and the Pall Mall Gazette adapt it weekly and daily to the palate of the million. Not that the free-thinkers are agreed together; they often jeer at each other. "Singular what gospels men will believe," cries Carlyle, [Footnote 140] "even gospels according to Jean Jacques." But this is the language of each, "Adieu, O church; thy road is that way, mine is this. ... What we are going to is abundantly obscure; but what all men are going from is very plain." [Footnote 141]
[Footnote 140: Thomas Carlyle's French Revolution, ii. 70.]
[Footnote 141: Carlyle's Life of Sterling, p. 286.]
These, then, are the two great antagonists, the Catholic Church and Infidelity in its last and most popular shape of Positivism. People in England are choosing their sides, and drawing nearer and nearer to one or the other of these champions. Minor differences are merging into the broad features which distinguish the two. To the positivism of Comte there stands opposed the positivism of the Church. She alone speaks positively, authoritatively, uniformly, and permanently, respecting the invisible world, the First Cause, the revelation of God in Christ, in the Gospel, the Scriptures, and the Church. She bears witness at the same time of God and of herself, and even those who cannot accept her testimony admit that of all the enemies of infidelity her presence is the most imposing, and her language the most unwavering and distinct. None can accuse her of hostility to science, for the Holy See in this, as in all past ages, has repeatedly declared with what favor it looks on really scientific labors. "It is impudently bruited abroad," wrote Pius IX. to M. Mahon de Monaghan, [Footnote 142] "that the Catholic religion and the Roman pontificate are adverse to civilization and progress, and therefore to the happiness which may thence be expected." "Rome," says the Dublin Review, [Footnote 143] "does not aim directly at material well-being; she does not teach astronomy or dynamics; she propounds no system of induction; she invents neither printing-press, steam-engines, nor telegraphs; but she so raises man above the brute, curbs his passions, improves his understanding, instils into him principles of duty and a sense of responsibility, so hallows his ambition and kindles his desire for the good of his kind and the progress of humanity, that, under her influence, he acquires insensibly an aptitude for the successful pursuit even of physical science, such as no other teacher could impart.
[Footnote 142: See Rome et la Civilisation. Paris, 1863.]
[Footnote 143: April, 1866, pp. 299, 301.]
.... It is manifest to all whose thoughts reach below the surface of things, that the services which Lord Bacon rendered to philosophy, and Newton to science, were indirectly due to the Catholic Church."
If the Catholic Church is ever to be rebuilt among us in anything like its ancient power and splendor, it must be raised on a broad basis. We do not mean that its real foundations admit of change or extension. They are the same from age to age. But they must, to meet the wants of the age, be made to appear as comprehensive as they really are. Happily, tolerant maxims now prevail in religion, and liberal views in politics. The divine right of hereditary kings is exploded, and persecution is no longer held up as a sacred duty. The Catholic Church, rightly understood, is the most liberal of all institutions. It is the source and security of true freedom, and it is only when perverted that it can serve the cause of despotism. It has everything to gain from liberty, and everything to lose by adopting tyrannical principles. Its best friends in England are those who labor to develop and exhibit its alliance with all that is true in science and good in mankind, and who rely more upon its heavenly powers of persuasion than on any excommunications and anathemas, who conciliate to the utmost without compromise, and relax rules without ever breaking or warping them. Anti-catholic writers have labored hard to prove that our religion is the enemy of progress, and it is therefore our duty and interest to show by word and deed how utterly false their assertions on this subject are. It will be a greater triumph for the church to have demonstrated her superior philosophy after fair discussion, than it would have been to suppress that discussion or to shirk it. We have really nothing to fear. Catholicism lies at the root of all sciences, and it alone makes progress possible.
Such are the views of the wisest and best of those English Catholics who work in the literary hive. They heartily adopt the words of M. Cochin, in his speech at Malines. "Christianity is the father of all progress, of all discoveries." "Every science is one of God's arguments, and every progress one of God's instruments." Modern science is but an offshoot of the Gospel, a result of the Incarnation. It redeems our bodies from a thousand disabilities and discomforts, as the Cross has redeemed our souls. The discovery of America, the art of printing, the telescope, the microscope, the clock, the mariner's needle, the steam-engine, superseding the slaves who were once the machinery of the world, gas, telegraphic wires, what are they but minor gospels and temporary redemptions for the toiling and weary sons of men? The Church views such improvements with delight, and sees in them the means, when rightly employed, of restoring the broken alliance between earthly and heavenly blessings. Is this what you call material progress? No, no; it is all moral improvement. You might as well call the press a material improvement as the railroad and the telegraph. As the one brings thought into immortal life, so the others redeem man from the sorrows of intervening distance. The Church affiliates them gladly to herself, and traces a moral advance in every material gain, a development of redemption by Christ in the progress of agriculture, improved machinery, in chloroform, in short-hand, lithography, photography, the respirator, and ever implement and utensil which makes labor less irksome and pain less poignant.