There is, then, this increasing purpose running through the history of God’s dealings with the human race: to bring into clearer light the divine character of his church, his spouse, rendering it less and less possible for men to recognize his existence and not be Christians, and, being Christians, not to be Catholics. This is the key of universal history.
There is not an “ultramontane,” a “clerical,” or a “papist,” in the sense in which these words are used by those hostile to the actual movement in France; and if its final outcome be favorable to the Catholic Church, it is because this is the nature of things.
VII.—ERRORS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY.
Europe for the past century has been in the state of transition to a new epoch—a renewal of Catholicity. This statement is in flat contradiction with the assertions of some modern thinkers who claim the title of philosophers. They would have us believe that religious motives—or, as they term it, “theological motives,” which is the same thing; for theology is nothing else than the scientific statement of religion—are exhausted. This is equivalent to saying that human nature is exhausted; for religion is what lies deepest in human nature, and consequently all other motives will be exhausted before those of religion.
Religion is the very essence of man’s nature; for it springs from the intellectual sense of his entire dependence for existence on an absolute cause. Religion is, in its last analysis, reason’s recognition of God and man’s fulfilment of his relations to God. Religion and reason are, therefore, correlative.
Men who pretend that religious motives have ceased to have a strong hold upon human nature labor under a complete hallucination. First they fancy that those faculties through which God acts on the soul, and which bring the soul in contact with God, have by some strange freak suddenly become defunct. That religious motives to an almost incredible extent have become extinct in some men’s souls we, with pain and pity, admit; that this is the case with the bulk of mankind is an egregious mistake. There has seldom been an age when religious questions occupied so large a share of intellectual attention as our own; and religious motives still influence the bulk of mankind in their conduct.
It is too true, however, that a class of men have fatally succeeded, by a false education and an erroneous philosophy, in paralyzing the action of the noblest faculties of the soul; but this disease is confined to a small class. Deluded men! they would have the rest of mankind to esteem their descent as a privilege and count their defect an honor.
The second form in which the symptoms of this malady manifest themselves is the eschewing of the first principles of sound logic. As “God is a provisionary idea,” or “man’s intuition of himself projected into space,” or “the creation of a wish”—so runs their premise; and the religious faculties of the soul having become extinct, they jump to the most absurd of all conclusions: “God is extinct,” “the soul’s immortality is a fable,” and “religion is a worn-out superstition”! The inspired Psalmist wrote in his day that none but “the fool said in his heart, There is no God.” Were he now to come upon earth, he would be surprised to see the fools of his time dressed in the garb of philosophers and proclaiming from the house-tops as the highest wisdom, “God is extinct!” These delirious minds are like the ostrich, which, when on the point of being captured, blinds its eyes by thrusting its head under the sand, and foolishly fancies, because of its incapacity to see, it has destroyed its pursuers and escaped all danger.
“Le nid n’a pas créé l’oiseau.”
“I tell thee, friend, a speculating churl