NEW PUBLICATIONS.
The Spirit of Faith; or, What must I Do to Believe? Five Lectures delivered at S. Peter’s, Cardiff, by the Right Reverend Bishop Hedley, O.S.B. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1875.
When we noticed these lectures last month, we had not found time to do more than glance at them. But having since discovered their very uncommon merit, we feel bound to let our readers know it.
Never—we do not say seldom, but never—have we seen such a happy combination of simplicity with force. The bishop’s English, by itself, is a treat. His style has all the ease of conversation; here and there rising into eloquence, or delighting us with master-strokes of description and illustration. Then, as to the argument of his book, it is so amiable and courteous that no one can take offence; yet the points are put with stern fidelity and driven home with ruthless cogency.
The title speaks for itself. The “spirit of faith” is precisely what is least understood by non-Catholics; and again, “What they must do to believe” is the thing they most need to be shown.
When accused of being “mental slaves,” etc., we justly reply that, on the contrary, we are the freest of the free, that “truth” alone “makes free”; but perhaps we are apt to forget—or rather, we fail to insist—that the “spirit of faith” is, nevertheless, “a spirit of lowliness” (as the bishop says)—“of childlike obedience, and of ‘captivity’”; that there must be “a taking up of a yoke, a bowing of the head, a humbling of the heart.” It will therefore do Catholics good, as well as Protestants, to read the second of these lectures on “What faith is.” So, again, when allowing for the strength of prejudice in alienating the Protestant mind, we are in danger of false charity—by forgetting that prejudice may easily be a sin; and that wilfulness plays a large part in popular “ignorance” nowadays. The third and fourth lectures, on “Prejudice” and “Wilfulness” as “Obstacles to Faith,” are the best of their kind we remember to have seen, and we are sure that many Catholics need to read them—nor only for the sake of their Protestant friends.
But, of course, it is chiefly for the sake of Protestant friends that we wish to see these lectures in the hands of our readers. The book is something for an earnest man to go wild about. Its cost is little; and we hope it will soon be scattered broadcast over the land.
Religion and Science in their Relation to Philosophy. An Essay on the Present State of the Sciences. Read before the Philosophical Society of Washington. By Charles W. Shields, D.D., Professor of the Harmony of Science and Revealed Religion in Princeton College, N. J. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co. 1875.