“No; because God, in permitting these extraordinary events, had evidently his divine purpose for you. You must return and fulfil your vow, but you must not go alone. More than a month ago I asked permission of my superiors to be allowed to carry the consolations of religion to our brave troops in the field. This permission I received yesterday; and so I can at once precede you to the camp, and when you arrive will be your safeguard and protector.”
An enormous weight was taken off my mind by this proposal. I thanked him with my whole heart, and he then insisted on my going to sleep for some hours; for all that I had gone through had nearly exhausted my strength. After a good night’s rest I woke, refreshed in body and relieved in mind, to ride to Breslau, where I completed my military equipment and then returned to the camp.
[TO BE CONCLUDED NEXT MONTH.]
A FINAL PHILOSOPHY.[[162]]
The war waged by modern thought against supernatural revelation in the name of the so-called “advanced” science is looked upon in a different light by Catholic and by Protestant thinkers. Catholic philosophers and divines look upon it as a noisy but futile effort of modern anti-Christianism to shake and overthrow the mighty rock on which the incarnate God has been pleased to build his indefectible church. They know, of course, that they must be ready to fight, for the church to which they belong is still militant; but, far from apprehending a coming defeat, they feel certain of the victory. God is with them, and, on God’s infallible promise, the church whose cause they serve is sure of her final triumph. Protestant divines, on the contrary, hold no tokens of future victories, and look upon infidel science not as an enemy whom they have to fight, but as an old acquaintance, and a rather capricious one, whom they must try to keep within bounds of decency, and from whom they may borrow occasionally a few newly-forged weapons against the Catholic Church. Some sincere Protestants, considering the tendency of scientific thought to destroy all supernatural faith, saw, indeed, the necessity of resisting its baneful incursions; but their resistance did not, and could not, prove successful. Protestantism is the notorious offspring of rebellion; it is not built on the rock; it has no claims to special divine assistance; it cannot reckon but on human weakness for its support; it is supremely inconsistent; in short, it is no proof against the anti-Christian spirit of the age, and, what is still more discouraging, it is fully conscious of its progressive dissolution.
These considerations and others of a like nature kept continually coming to our mind as we were perusing the pages of the singular work whose title stands at the head of this article. The great object of Dr. Shields is to reconcile religion with science by means of what he calls final philosophy.
In the introduction to the work the author points out the limits and the topics of Christian science; the logical, historical, and practical relations of science and religion; the possibility of their reconciliation, and the importance of their harmony to science, to religion, to philosophy. The work is divided into two parts. The first part is a review of the conduct of philosophical parties as to the relations between science and religion; whilst the second part propounds and explains the philosophical theory of the harmony of science and religion, as conceived by the author. The first part opens with a chapter on the early conflicts and alliances between science and religion, where the author investigates the causes of the present disturbed relations between religion and science, and traces them from the dawn of the Greek philosophy to the Protestant Reformation; describes the conflicts of philosophy and mythology in the pre-Christian age; the wars of pagan philosophy against Christianity in the first centuries of the present era; the alliance of theology with philosophy in the patristic age; the predominance of theology and the subjugation of philosophy in the scholastic age; and, lastly, the revolt of philosophy against theology in the age of the Reformation.
In a second chapter he describes the modern antagonism between science and religion, the conflict in astronomy, in geology, in anthropology, in psychology, in sociology, in theology, in philosophy, and in civilization.
The third chapter, which fills more than two hundred pages, describes the modern indifferentism between science and religion, under the name of “schism” or “rupture” in all the branches of science already enumerated—viz., the schism in astronomy, in geology, in anthropology, etc., to which is added the schism in metaphysics.