As to those outside the church, they will never believe in this evolution, because they suppose that the doctrine of infallibility has condemned us to a kind of petrifaction. But if they study the actual situation, events will undeceive them from this present moment.
The persecutions which deprive the church of her temporalities, of her exterior worship, of her religious edifices, which go the length even of depriving the faithful of their priests and bishops, which suppress as far as they can the external part of Catholicity, do they not reveal the power of its interior?
In the parts of Switzerland and Germany where the populations are robbed of their clergy and worship, do we not see faith developing in sacrifice, and piety becoming more serious and fervent in the privation of all external aid? This example is an additional proof of the opportuneness of Father Hecker’s pamphlet. If God wills that the persecution should increase, we must be prepared to do without the external means which he himself has instituted, and which he accords to us in ordinary times. For we must not forget that no human power can separate us from God, and that so long as this union exists religion remains entire as to its substance.
The merit of the Christian is in the intention which inspires his acts. Religion exists only in the idea which clothes its rites; the sacraments, the channels of grace, are only effective in us as they are preceded by the dispositions of our soul. For a religion not to degenerate, it must perpetually renew the internal life, in order to resist the encroachments of routine.
Here the author asks what is the polemic best suited to help the people of these times to escape from their unbelief, which often proceeds from regarding the church as having fallen into formalism and into a debasing authoritativism. He believes they might be undeceived by disclosing to them the inner life of religion and the internal proofs of her divinity—an idea he shares with the most illustrious writers of our age. Lacordaire wrote to Mme. Swetchine that he had reversed the point of view of the controversy in scrutinizing matters from within, which manifested truth under a new aspect.
Father Hecker quotes in this sense the striking words of Schlegel: “We shall soon see, I think, an exposition of Christianity appear which will bring about union among all Christians, and convert the unbelieving themselves.” Ranke said with no less decision: “This reconciliation of faith and science will be more important, as regards its spiritual results, than was the discovery, three centuries ago, of a new hemisphere, than that of the true system of the universe, or than that of any other discovery of science, be it what it may.”
The pamphlet ends with a philosophy of race. And here the author, whilst acknowledging his fear of wounding susceptibilities, expresses the hope that none of his views will be exaggerated. He inquires what natural elements the several races have offered to the church in the successive phases of her history; and, starting from the principle that God has endowed the races with different aptitudes, he examines in what way those aptitudes may co-operate in the terrestrial execution of the designs of Providence. The Latin-Celtic races, who almost alone remained faithful to the church in the XVIth century, have for authority and external observances tastes which coincide with the more special development of the church since that epoch.
On the contrary, the Anglo-Saxon races have subjective and metaphysical instincts which, in a natural point of view, should attract them to the church in the new phase on which she is entering. Father Hecker has been accused with some asperity of predicting that the direction of the church and of the world will pass into the hands of the Saxon races, whose conversion, sooner or later, he anticipates. But he does not in any sense condemn the Latin races to inferiority. He merely gives it as his opinion that the Latin races can only issue from the present crisis by the development of that interior life of independent reason and deliberate volition which constitutes the force of the Saxon races. God has not given the church to the Latin races. He has not created for nothing the Saxon, Sclavonic, and other races which cover the surface of the globe. They have their predestined place in the assembly of all the children of God, and are called to serve the church according to their providential aptitudes.
Father Hecker and Dr. Newman are not the only ones who think that the absence of the Saxon races has been, for some centuries, very prejudicial to the church. J. de Maistre, whose bias cannot be suspected, expressed himself even more explicitly to that effect. The Latin genius, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, has been and will continue to be of the utmost value to the church. Under the divine influence, the Saxon genius will, in its way, effect equally precious conquests.
In conclusion, we summarize thus the ideas of Father Hecker: