"After having replaced Christianity face to face with history, with reason, with conscience; after having interpreted it with all liberty of mind, we feel ourselves confirmed in our respect for the Catholic tradition. We have drawn from our studies new motives for the conviction that the actual organization of the church is excellent, both for moderating in a suitable degree the sovereignty of the smaller number, while at the same time infusing a spirit of subordination into the masses, and also for procuring the largest possible dose of happiness for men; we mean by this that happiness which arises from the voluntary submission of their minds to a mild and persuasive moral power, and not to a mere coercive restraint." [Footnote 124]
[Footnote 124: La Réforme en Itilie, pref. p. xi.]
This is not the language of superstition or of unintelligent enthusiasm, but of calm, well-reasoned conviction, the language of men supremely devoted to the pursuit of truth for its own sake; and it is but a fair specimen of the language of all the great advocates of the Catholic religion. It would be utterly impossible for any system, destitute of solid foundations and unsupported by reasonable proofs, to endure the perpetual and thorough researches and investigations carried on by a vast body of learned men in the Catholic schools for ages, with the full approbation and encouragement of the highest authorities in the church. The theory that such a set of men could be made the dupes of an arbitrary authority administered with the intention of swaying the minds of men by a systematic violation of all the rights of reason, or made the partisans and upholders of what they knew to be an imposture, is too incredible for anything less than a boundless credulity to embrace.
Let us turn our attention now to that class of minds nurtured in anti-Catholic opinions, over whom the Catholic Church has regained in part or completely an influence, bringing them to the recognition of her divine authority. What is the force which has made itself felt at the great distance to which the Protestant mind has been violently thrown by the revolution of the sixteenth century, and which has drawn back toward the Catholic centre a body of persons who cannot be either ignored or despised without the most stolid prejudice or the sheerest affectation? Is it a mere force which is capable of acting only on the emotions, the imagination, the sensible portion of the nature of individuals in whom reason does not exercise her just and rightful supremacy? Are there none who have been led by the philosophy of history, by metaphysics, by theological reasoning, by the investigation of Scripture, by the search for a supreme and universal science, by the deductions of logic, and the inductions of experience and observation, to a calm and rational conviction that the highest wisdom and the most perfect law are embodied in the Catholic Church? The statement of Lord Macaulay is familiar to all, that the doctrines of the Catholic Church have heretofore commanded the assent of the wisest and best of mankind, and may therefore command the assent of men similar to them in the future. A fair examination of the question will convince any one of the fact, which cannot be gainsaid by any one professing to love the truth supremely for its own sake, that numbers of men fully qualified to judge of evidence and to comprehend the most abstruse reasoning have given the homage of their minds to Catholic doctrine precisely because of the invincible logic both of facts and arguments by which its truth was demonstrated to their reason.
Leibnitz is one instance in point. Although he never joined the communion of the Catholic Church, yet the whole weight of his authority as a philosopher and a theologian is on the side of the Catholic principles and doctrines, which are the most obnoxious to our modern rationalists. The same is true of Baron Stark, the author of the Banquet of Theodulus. The celebrated Leo, one of the greatest historians of Germany, began his career as a Pantheist, and by his profound historical studies was brought to a full conviction of the divine authority of revelation, and of the necessity of a return to the communion of the Holy See on the part of all the dissentient and separated communions. His Universal History is an irrefutable argument for the truth of Christianity and the authority of the Roman Church. Although, therefore, none of these three distinguished men can be counted among the converts to the Catholic Church, yet their names can be cited in support of the position we have taken, since we are persuaded that our candid opponents will admit that strict logical consistency would require any one admitting their premises to draw the practical conclusion that it is obligatory on his conscience to become a member of the Catholic Church.
Hurter, Phillipps, and Stolberg are instances of German scholars whom profound and learned studies brought to a full Catholic conviction. Mayne de Biran is an example of a philosopher, who reasoned himself out of infidelity into a firm conviction of the truth of the Catholic religion by a metaphysical process. Passing by those well-known persons in England and America whose education was ecclesiastical, we may cite an Englishman, Sir George Bowyer, and an American, Judge Burnett, first governor of California, as instances of men who applied the principles of law and jurisprudence to the evidence of the claims of the Catholic Church, and were led to submit to them by a process of legal argument, which the latter gentleman has developed at length in his able work, entitled The Path which led a Protestant Lawyer to the Catholic Church. The late Dr. Bellinger, of Charleston, S. C., a physician who stood at the head of the medical profession in his State, devoted thirteen years to a careful study of the Catholic doctrines, before he publicly embraced them.
Among those who have devoted their pens to the Catholic cause in our own country, whether they have been educated to the Catholic faith or have been converted to it from Protestantism, without doubt the man who surpasses all others in intellectual power is Dr. Brownson. No one would think of reckoning him among devotees or dilettanti. If Dr. Bellows were to express his opinion upon the motives which induced him to submit his masculine intelligence to the teaching of the church, he would probably acknowledge that he had him chiefly in view when he made the statement referred to in a former part of this article. That is, he would say that Dr. Brownson's conversion to Catholicity was an act of intellectual despair, a suicide committed by his reason because of its failure to attain by its own efforts that transcendental science after which it was aspiring. The reply to this is the same which AEschylus made before the judge at whose tribunal he was accused of having lost the use of his reason through old age. He recited a play which he had recently composed, as evidence that his intellect still remained in its pristine vigor. And so Dr. Brownson may with equal justice point to the unanswered and unanswerable works which his pen has produced since his conversion, and challenge those who pretend that he has yielded his mind to an irrational superstition to refute the arguments of his Essays and The Convert. The mere effort to read understandingly the latter book is the severest tax which any ordinary brain can submit to. The philosophical articles published in the Review, which Dr. Brownson conducted with such remarkable ability for a long period, surpass by far any specimens of metaphysical writing contained in the English language. The frivolity of the age, and various causes connected with temporary and personal controversies, have prevented the full recognition of the value and merit of these philosophical essays, which it is probable they will receive in the future time. The doctor has written a vast amount on a great number of topics both ecclesiastical and secular, since he devoted his labors to the Catholic cause, and no doubt there are many inconsistent and varying opinions to be found in his works, especially in regard to matters outside the domain of pure philosophy and theology. Nevertheless, in our judgment, which we believe posterity will ratify, the pure gold stands in a very large proportion to the ore, and will only become brightened and purified by the severest tests of the crucible which reduces every reputation to its just dimensions. We believe that Dr. Brownson's writings contain the most complete refutation of the sceptical, pantheistic, sensist, and pseudo-inductive or positivist errors of the day, as well as of the chief heterodox systems of doctrine. In that noblest and most essential portion of philosophy which includes ontology and theodicy, he has laid down the metaphysical basis of natural theology with a Platonic depth and an Aristotelian precision of reasoning. Beside the massive structure of arguments respecting the positive evidences of the authority and infallibility of the church which he has erected, a work in which he has many able compeers, who though not more logical are more erudite than himself, he has thrown out some masterpieces in that more difficult and more rarely executed branch of labor, the exposition of the hidden, abstruse harmonies between rational truths and the mysteries of faith. Prescinding all question respecting the fact of his having presented the Catholic doctrine in such a light as to demonstrate its reasonableness, which is not the point at issue, he has at least attempted it. He has shown that a man can be a thorough-going, orthodox Catholic, and at the same time a philosopher in the highest and best sense of the word.
These instances are only examples and illustrations of a general rule. The two maxims of St. Augustine, intellectum valde ama, and fides quaerens intellectum have always been and are now maxims of the Catholic schools. The church has no fear of light, no dread of the progress of science; in point of fact, the greatest obstacles which advocates of the Catholic cause have to contend with are ignorance, disregard of the laws of logic, and the lack of belief in the reality and certainty of the affirmations or judgments of pure reason. It is only slowly and with great difficulty that we can get the public either of writers or readers to pay attention to the facts of history, and cast away the fables with which they have been duped themselves and duping others for so long. It is equally difficult to force the controversy respecting philosophical and theological principles to the true logical issues, to get attention to our arguments, or to extract from our opponents any clear and distinct answers to them, or definite and precise statements of their own positions. Bishop England scarcely did anything else in his masterly controversies than to point out the rules of logic violated by his opponents, and the misstatements of historical facts and Catholic doctrines made by them. The truth is, that our conflict is far less with any positive system of heterodoxy or rationalism than with a vague but universal scepticism. It is not so much that men disbelieve in the specific doctrines of revelation, as that they disbelieve in the existence of any truth. The power of reason, the capacity of the intellect to grasp the intelligible, the certainty of rational principles and logical deductions, the dignity of philosophy, are not exaggerated, they are depreciated. Those who revolt from the legitimate and supreme authority of God, divine revelation, and the infallible teaching of the church over the mind of man, are not the legitimate offspring of the ancient philosophers, or the true continuators of philosophy. The ancient philosophers of Greece and China recognized the need of a divine revelation, a supernatural light, a teacher sent from God. The whole civilized world of heathenism was gasping in agony for the advent of the divine Redeemer when he appeared on the earth. Our modern self-styled rationalists have turned their backs on that light toward which Lao-Tseu, Confucius, Socrates, and Plato had their faces turned; and they have cut themselves loose from the traditional wisdom, not only of Christianity and Judaism, but of all the sages of heathendom and of the whole human race. Consequently, they are smitten with intellectual death, they cannot advance or construct; they can only go backward, destroy, doubt, deny, groan with despairing agony, and die. The modern literature of unbelief is either a sneer or a lament; as to philosophy, it has fallen into contempt, and is generally scouted. Those who profess to handle grave themes in earnest are usually inconsequent, vague, full of hypotheses and random statements; by their own confession mere wanderers in search of truth who have lost their way; rhetoricians, guessers, men who teach not as having authority, even the authority of reason, but as the Scribes. The few men who possess rare native philosophical genius, like Mill and Spencer, having no principles or data to begin with, imitate the great master of modern philosophical scepticism, Immanuel Kant, and pervert reason and logic into an instrument for destroying all true intellectual science. Mr. Mill denies that we know that it is a necessary and universal truth that two and two make four. It may be therefore that in some future state of existence he will have the same evidence that one is equal to two which he now has that one is only equal to one, and that he is therefore some one else as well as himself, and perhaps responsible for all the crimes committed by Caligula. Nevertheless, he assures us that the ideas of justice and right in God must be the same that they are in his own mind, and that if any punishment is inflicted on him hereafter, which does not accord with his present sense of justice, he will never admit the right of inflicting it. Yet, upon his own principles, he cannot be sure that his own ideas of right and justice will not be totally altered in the next world, and that his reason will not compel him to admit that what now seems to him unjust will then appear to be precisely the contrary. No matter, therefore, how absurd may be the doctrines which are professed as dogmas by any religious sect, no follower of Mr. Mill can have any right to reject them on purely rational grounds. Mr. Spencer laboriously argues to convince us that we are compelled by the principles of logic to admit the truth of a number of directly contradictory propositions, and that consequently all pure metaphysics are worthless, and all that is worth knowing is unknowable. When such laughable follies are seriously put forth and lauded to the skies as the sum of human wisdom in its most advanced stage of progress, and when the fanciful hypotheses of Darwin are vaunted as science by men who profess to follow the inductive philosophy, it is the turn of the advocates of revelation and the mysteries of the Catholic faith to cry out upon the outrage that is put upon reason, and to deride the credulity of those who can be duped by such crude absurdities. Human reason and the mind of man are indeed extremely weak and fallible if the estimate of them made by these sceptical writers is to be taken as correct. Weak and fallible as they are, and incapable of affirming anything in the order of pure reason and objective reality, according to this humiliating theory, yet nevertheless they can be forced to admit as much reality in the revealed truths of the Catholic faith as in anything else. The capacity of the mind to take note of particular facts and phenomena, and by induction to reduce these particulars to general laws, and also the necessity of following practical reason as an actual guide, will be admitted even by the most extreme unbelievers. The facts and phenomena produced by the action of the Catholic Church on the human race, and by Jesus Christ himself in his life, death, and resurrection, as observed and attested by competent witnesses, just as much warrant us in making the induction that he is a superhuman intelligence, as all the observations of astronomy warrant us in accepting the heliocentric theory of Copernicus. Practical reason tells us that the religion of Jesus Christ as explained by the Catholic Church is good for mankind, and the safest rule we can follow. If, therefore, we find probable evidence of the fact that Jesus Christ has taught certain doctrines through the church regarding that sphere of the unknowable into which reason cannot penetrate, it would seem to be the dictate of good sense and of a right conscience that we should submit to that teaching. The power of objecting to any doctrine that does not satisfy reason or apparently contradicts it has been surrendered. Reason cannot judge of the unknowable. We have all the certainty that the case admits of that Jesus Christ possesses a reason of higher order to which that which is unknowable to us is clearly intelligible, and that he has declared to us the truth of these doctrines. We have, moreover, evidence of his benevolence and veracity, and therefore all the motives which we are capable of appreciating combine to induce us to give the same assent to his teaching that we do to any generally received truths. Even on this low level, Christianity and Catholicity can stand their ground far better than any other subject of analytical investigation. It is true that logically and philosophically we attain only to the apparent and the abstract truth of Christianity. But if the individual asserts for himself, or the Catholic Church asserts for herself, a supernatural light, an illumination of the intellect giving certainty, how can the allegation be refuted? How can any advocate of the ignoramus theory show that, if we are naturally in such a deep darkness of the unknowable, it is not probable that God would send a ray of supernatural light to enlighten us? The natural outcry of one in such a state would be, "O my God! if there be a God, send the light of truth, if there is any truth, to enlighten my soul, if I have a soul!"