really outgrown it, nor in becoming convinced that, instead of outgrowing it, we had fallen below it; that the old church, the central institution of the world, was as needful to us now as in the beginning; and that, in comparison with the full noonday light which beamed from her divine countenance, the light in which we had hitherto walked, or stumbled, rather, was but a fading twilight, nay, midnight darkness.
Of course we differ far more from positivism than does Dr. McCosh, but we can as Catholics better discriminate than he what is true and just in them, and better understand and refute their errors or false principles, because we have the whole truth to oppose to them, not merely certain fragments or disfigured aspects of truth. It is only Catholics who can really set right the class of men Dr. McCosh wars against. Protestants cannot do it. When Theodore Parker published his Discourse of Matters pertaining to Religion, we had not—we speak personally again—outgrown the Protestantism in which we had been trained. We set about refuting him, and we saw at once we could not do it on Protestant grounds, and we planted ourselves on Catholic ground, as far as we then knew it, and our refutation was a total failure except so far as we opposed to the Discourse the principles of the Catholic Church. Dr. McCosh has tried his hand in the volume before us against Theodore Parker and the Free Religionists, and with no success save so far as he abandons his Protestantism and quietly appropriates the arguments of Catholics, to which he has no more right than he has to his neighbor’s horse. It was hardly generous in the learned doctor, while using their arguments—and they were the only arguments that availed him anything—to turn upon Catholics and twit
them of “ignorance and superstition.” Was he afraid that people might discover the source whence he drew the small stock of wisdom and truth he displayed?
We might have made Dr. McCosh’s lectures the occasion of presenting a formal refutation of positivism, but we had already taken up from time to time the false principles, the errors and untenable theories and hypotheses, which his lectures treat, and refuted them, so far as they are hostile to Christianity, far more effectively, in our judgment, than he has done or could do. He may be more deeply versed in the errors and absurd hypotheses of the false scientists of the day, who are laboring to explain and account for the universe without creation and Providence, than we are; but we have not found in his volume anything of any value which we have not ourselves already said, and said too, perhaps, in a style more easily understood than his, and in better English than he ordinarily uses. Our readers could learn nothing of positivism from him, and just as little of the principles and reasonings that Christianity is able to oppose to it. He writes as a man who measures the known by what he himself knows, and is now and then out in his measurement.
Dr. McCosh, also, adopts rather too depreciatory a tone in speaking of our countrymen, especially considering that he has but just come among us, and knows us at best only imperfectly. We own it was no striking indication of American intelligence and judgment the importation of him to preside over one of the best Protestant American institutions of learning and science; but men often loom up larger at a distance than they are when seen close by, and there is no country in which bubble reputations from abroad more speedily collapse
than our own. The doctor will find, when he has lived longer among us, and becomes better acquainted with us, that if England is nearer Germany, German speculations are known to Americans and appreciated by them at least as soon as they are by Englishmen or Scotsmen. Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, were known to American scholars before there was much knowledge of them in England or Scotland. The English and Scotch are now just becoming acquainted with and are carried away by theories and speculations in philosophy which had been examined here, and exploded more than thirty years ago by Americans. The doctor underrates the scholarship and intelligence even of his American Presbyterian friends, and there are scholars, men of thought, of science, general intelligence, in the country many degrees above Presbyterians, respectable as they are. Presbyterians are not by any means the whole American people, nor the most advanced portion of them. They are really behind the Congregationalists, to say nothing of “the ignorant and superstitious” Catholics, whose scholars are in science and learning, philosophy, theology, especially in the history of the church, it is no boast to say, superior to either, and know and understand better the movements of the age, intellectual, moral, social, and political theories, crotchets, and tendencies of the present, than any other class of American citizens. It takes more than a Dr. McCosh, although for a time a professor in Belfast, Ireland, to teach them more than they already know.
We pass over the second part of the lectures, devoted to Apologetics, as of no importance. One needs to know what Christianity is, and to have clearly in his mind the entire Christian plan, before one can successfully
defend it against the class of persons the author calls Positivists. This is more than the author knows, or as a Protestant can know. His Christianity is an indefinite, vague, variable, and uncertain opinion, and he has no conception at all of the Christian plan, or what St. Paul calls “the new creation.” No doubt the miracles are provable by simple historical testimony by and to one who knows nothing of the Christian plan, or of its supernatural character; but to the unbelievers of our time it is necessary to set forth, in its unity and catholicity, the Christian schema, if we may be allowed the term, and to show that miracles themselves have their reason or law in the divine plan or decree, and are no more anomalies, in relation to that plan or decree, or ex parte Dei, than are earthquakes and volcanoes. It is only in this way we can satisfy the demand for order and regularity. The unbeliever may not be able to resist the testimony which proves the miracle a fact, but till we show him that in a miracle the natural laws are not violated, or that nature does not go out of her course, as he imagines, we cannot satisfy him that he can yield to the miracle without surrendering his natural reason, and the law and order of the universe.
Now, this the Protestant cannot do; and though he might adduce the historical evidences of Christianity satisfactory to a simpler age, or to minds, though steeped in error, yet retaining from tradition a full belief in the reality of a supernatural order, he cannot as a Protestant do it to minds that deny that there is or can be anything above nature, and that refuse utterly to admit the supernatural order, which the miracles manifest, or that reject miracles, not because the testimony is insufficient,
but because they cannot be admitted without admitting the reality of the supernatural. The prejudice against the supernatural must be removed as the preliminary work, and this can be done only by presenting Christianity as a whole in its unity and catholicity, and showing that, according to it, the supernatural or Christian order enters into the original decree of God, and is necessary to complete what is initial in the cosmos, or to perfect the natural order and to enable it to fulfil the purpose for which it exists, or realize its destiny or final cause, in which is its beatitude or supreme good. This done, the prejudice against the supernatural is removed, miracles are seen to be in the order, not indeed of nature, as Carlyle pretends, but in the order of the supernatural, and demanding only ordinary historical testimony to be proved, and consequently Hume’s famous argument against miracles, refuted by no Protestant that has protested against it, shown to have no force.