Whether any savage tribe was ever civilized under gentilism is, perhaps, doubtful; but if the philosophers of history would take the right line, instead of a collateral line or bastard branch of the human family, and follow it from Adam down, through the patriarchs, the synagogue, and the Catholic Church, they would find that there has always been a believing, a faithful, an enlightened, and a civilized people on earth, and they never would and never could have imagined any thing so untrue as that man began "in the lowest form of barbarism in which he can subsist as man." We have no indication of the existence of any savage or barbarous tribes before the flood; nor after the flood, till the confusion of language at Babel, and the consequent dispersion of the human race; that is, till after the gentile apostasy, of which they are one of the fruits. Adam, by his fall, lost communion with God, became darkened in his understanding, enfeebled in his will, and disordered in his appetites and passions; but he did not lose all his science, forget all his moral and religious instruction, and become a complete savage. Besides, his communion with God was renewed by repentance and faith in the promised Messiah, or incarnate Son of God, who should come to redeem the world, and enable man to fulfil his destiny, or attain his end.
We do not by any means deny progress. We believe in it with St. Paul, and struggle for it in individuals and in society. We only do not believe in progress or perfectibility by the simple forces of nature alone, or that man is naturally progressive. Existences have two movements or cycles: the one, their procession, by way of creation, from God as first cause; the other, their return, without absorption in him, to God as their final cause or beatitude, as we have on several occasions very fully shown. In the first cycle, man is explicated by natural generation, and his powers are determined by his nature, or the physical laws of his existence. In the second cycle, his explication is by regeneration, a supernatural act; and his progress is directed and controlled by the moral law prescribed by God as final cause, and is limited only by the infinite, to which he aspires, and, by the assistance of grace, may attain. The first cycle is initial, and in it there is no moral, religious, or social progress; there is only physical development and growth. It is under the natural laws of the physicists, who never look any further. The second cycle is teleological, and under the moral law, or the natural law of the theologians and the legists. In this teleological cycle lies the whole moral order, as distinguished from the physical; the whole of religion; its means, influences, and ends; and, consequently, civilization, in so far as it has any moral or religious character, aims, or tendency.
Civilization, we are aware, is a word that has hardly a fixed meaning, and is used vaguely, and in different senses. It is derived from a word signifying the city—in modern language, the state—and relates to the organization, constitution, and administration of the commonwealth or republic. It is used vaguely for the aggregate of the manners, customs, and usages of city life, and also for the principles and laws of a well ordered and well-governed civil society. We take it chiefly in the latter sense, and understand by it the supremacy of the moral order in secular life, the reign of law, or the subjection of the passions and turbulent elements of human nature in the individual, the family, and society to the moral law; or, briefly, the predominance of reason and justice over passion and caprice in the affairs of this world, and therefore coincident with liberty, as distinguished from license. The race began in civilization, because it began with a knowledge of the law of human existence, man's origin and destiny, and of the means and conditions of gaining the end for which he exists; and because he was placed in the outset by his Maker in possession of these means and conditions, so that he could not fail except through his own fault. Those who reject, neglect, or pervert the moral order, follow only the natural laws, separate from the communion of the faithful, and remain in the initial cycle, gradually become barbarians, superstitious, the slaves of their own passions, cruel and merciless savages, even if still cultivated, refined, and mild-mannered.
We place civilization, then, in the second cycle or movement of existences, under the moral law, and must do so or deny it all moral basis or moral character. What is not moral in its aims and tendencies, or is not in the order of man's return to God as his last end, we exclude from civilization, as no part of it, even if called by its name. There is no civilization where there is no state or civil polity; and there can be no state or civil polity, though there may be force, tyranny, and slavery, out of the moral order. The state lies in the moral or teleological order, and is under the moral law—the law prescribed by God as final cause. It derives all its principles from it, and is founded and governed by it. Its very mission is the maintenance of justice, freedom, and order; and, as far as it goes, to keep men's faces towards the end for which they are created. And hence the concord there is, or should be, between the state and the church.
Most of those things, it will be seen from this, after which the gentiles seek, and which the moderns call civilization, may be adjuncts of civilization, in the sense of our Lord, when he says, "Seek first the kingdom of God and his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you;" but they do not constitute civilization, are not it, nor any part of it. Here is where modern gentilism errs, no less than did the ancient. Take up any of the leading journals of the day, and you will find what with great emphasis is called modern civilization is in the initial order, not the teleological; and is only a development and application of the natural laws of the physicists, not the natural or moral law of the theologians and legists. The press and popular orators called, a few years ago, Cyrus W. Field, who had taken a leading share in laying a submarine telegraph from the western coast of Ireland to the eastern coast of Newfoundland, a "second Messiah." When, after much urging and some threats, President Lincoln proclaimed, as a war measure, the emancipation of the slaves in certain States and parts of States then at war with the general government, the press and orators that approved, both at home and abroad, forthwith pronounced him also a "second Messiah," and without stopping to inquire whether the emancipation would be any thing more than the exchange of one form of compulsory physical labor for another, perhaps no better. Now, when a new Atlantic cable is laid from France to Massachusetts, we are told in flaring capitals and lofty periods that it is another and a glorious triumph of modern civilization—of mind over matter, man over nature. If our San Francisco friend succeeds in constructing an aerial ship, with which he can navigate the air, it will be a greater triumph still of modern civilization, and the theologians and moralists will have to hide their heads. All this shows that civilization, by the leaders of public opinion in our day, is placed wholly in the physical order, and consists in the development and application of the natural laws to the accomplishment of certain physical ends or purposes of utility only in the first cycle of our existence, and without the least moral significance. So completely have we become devoted to the improvement of our condition in the initial order, that we forget that life does not end with it, or that the initial exists only for the teleological, and that our development and application of the physical laws of nature imply no progress in civilization, or the realization of a moral ideal.
But whatever success we may have in developing and applying to our own purposes the physical laws of man and the globe he inhabits, we must remember that no success of that sort initiates us into the second cycle, or the life of our return to God. To enter that life we must be regenerated, and we can no more regenerate than we can generate ourselves. Here, we may see why even to civilization the Incarnation of the Word is necessary. The hypostatic union of the divine and human natures in the divine person of the Word carries the creative act to its summit, completes the first cycle, and initiates the second, into which we can enter only as we are reborn of Christ, as we were born in the first cycle of Adam. Hence, Christ is called the second Adam, the Lord from heaven. Civilization, morality, salvation, are in one sense in the same order and under one and the same law.
Progress being possible, except in the sense of physical development, only in the movement of return to God as final cause, and that movement originating in the Incarnation only, it follows that those nations alone that are united to Christ by faith and love, either united to him who was to come, as were the patriarchs and the synagogue, before the Incarnation, or to him in the church or the regeneration, as are Catholics since, are or can be progressive, or even truly civilized nations. They who assert progress by our natural forces alone, confound the first cycle with the second, generation with regeneration, and the natural laws, which proceed from God as first cause, with the natural or moral law which is prescribed by God as final cause. It is a great mistake, then, to suppose, as many do, that the mysteries of faith, even the most recondite, have no practical bearing on the progress of men and nations, or that it is safe, in studying civilization, to take our point of departure in gentilism.
In accordance with our conclusion, we find that gentile nations, ancient or modern, are really unprogressive, save in the physical or initial order; which is of no account in the moral or teleological order. We deny not the achievements of Protestant nations in the physical order; but, in relation to the end for which man exists, they not only do not advance beyond what they took with them from the church, but are constantly deteriorating. They have lost the condition of moral and spiritual progress, individually and collectively, by losing communion with Christ in his church; they have lost Christ, in reality, if not in name; and by losing the infallible word preserved by the church alone, they have lost or are losing the state, civil authority itself, and finding themselves reduced to what St. Paul calls "the natural man." They place all their hopes in physical success, always certain to fail in the end, when pursued for its own sake.
We have raised and we raise here no question as to what God might have done, or how or with what powers he might have created man, had he chosen. We only take the plan he has chosen to adopt; and which, in his providence and grace, he carries out. In the present decree, as say the theologians, he has subjected the whole teleological order to one and the same law; and civilization, morality, and Christian sanctity are not separable in principle, and depend on one and the same fundamental law. Gentilism divorces religion and the state from morality; and modern heresy recognizes no intrinsic relation between them. It tells us religion is necessary to the stability of the political order; that Christianity is the basis of morality, and that it is the great agent of progress; but it shows us no reason why it is or should be so, and in its practical doctrine it teaches that it is not so. Every thing, as far as it informs us, depends on arbitrary appointment, and without any reason of being in the system of things which God has seen proper to create. Hence, people are unable to form to themselves any clear view of the relation of religion and morality, of morality and civilization, or to arrive at any satisfactory understanding of the purpose and law of human existence; and they either frame to themselves the wildest, the most fanciful, or the most absurd theories, or give the whole up in despair, sink into a state of utter indifference, and say, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." They simply vegetate in vice or crime, or, at best, only take themselves to the study of the physical sciences, or the cultivation of the fine arts. We have shown that their difficulties and discouragements are imaginary, and arise from ignorance of the divine plan of creation, and the mutual relation and dependence of all its parts. One divine thought runs through the whole, and nothing does or can stand alone. We study things too much in their analysis, not enough in their synthesis.