Is like a beast some evil spirit chases
Along a barren heath in one perpetual whirl,
While round about lie fair, green pasturing places.”
The eternal God is, and in him is all that lives, moves, and exists, and his providence directs all things to the end for which he called them into existence.
The world is not out of joint, nor is the responsibility of setting it right placed upon the unsteady and feeble shoulders of inventors of absurd religions, the cogitators of false philosophies, or the dreamers of sterile Utopias.
God is not ousted from his creation as easily as these ambitious philosophers, who are so ready to occupy his place in the universe, would have the world believe.
VIII.—MISTAKE OF MODERN PHILOSOPHERS.
The mistake of a class of speculative thinkers consists in regarding the state of transition of society from one epoch to another—in interpreting a phase of religion—as the change and vanishing of the indestructible elements of all religion.
A certain class of truths suits one age, awakens the greatest enthusiasm and profoundest devotion, and in another epoch falls dead almost upon the ears of men and hardly calls forth an audible response. Epochs differ from epochs in their aspirations and instincts, like those of individuals; and this is a law of the providential education and growth of the human race. One race of men differs from another in its capacity to seize hold of, appreciate, and give the proper expression to certain truths, and in turn is brought to the front ranks in the providential march of humanity. And this is the intention of the Author of the human family. Men of the same race differ also greatly from each other; for in the wide universe there are no two things in all respects precisely alike, and in this is seen displayed God’s creative power.
These separate epochs, this variety of races, and these differences among men afford to Christianity the opportunities and means of giving expression to the great truths contained in all religions of which she is the adequate representation. For Christianity is the synthesis of all the scattered truths of every form of religion which has existed from the beginning of the world, and the Catholic Church is its complete organic, living form. Christianity is the abstract expression of the Catholic Church, which, in the successive centuries of her existence, has come in contact with every race of men, and has known how to Christianize and retain them in her fold in harmony with their natural instincts. She has met humanity in every stage of its development, from the intellectual and refined Greek to the man-eating savage, and, by working on the foundations of nature, she has captivated them to the easy yoke of Christ. The Catholic Church alone has known how to supply the defects of human nature and correct its vices while giving free play to its instincts and retaining the charm of its native originality—not by a superior human sagacity or a preternatural craft, as sophists would make the world believe, but because in her dwells that divine Spirit which breathed into man’s nostrils the breath of life, and made him a living, rational, immortal soul, and in whom he lives, moves, and has his being.