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things we know. It is the Christian faith which unrolls a glorious expanse of natural truth before us, and furnishes proofs, not hard to understand, which it had been a stroke of genius to discover.

"Take away the light of Revelation." Alas! how fast is the eclipse coming on which threatens to blot it out from our English firmament. The century found this an orthodox Protestant country, it will leave it Protestant, perchance, but no longer orthodox. What with the growth of undigested knowledge, the profuse chatter of a thousand journals, and the free importation of infidelity from abroad, the ancient lines of thought have been unable to resist pressure. At this moment it cannot be said that there is any exposition of belief which a majority of Englishmen would approve. To-day every one must think for himself. If the spirit of the age is comprehensive, in that it would know all that ever has been known, much more is it critical, in that all classes are conscious of a power, latent hitherto, to pass judgment on whatever seeks to rule them from without.

Thus is confusion worse confounded. New knowledge, new experience are wont to vex the faith even of those who possess essential truths, of Catholics brought up in simplicity. Imagine, now, what a temptation that must be which cries out that old and new alike require sifting, that he is a coward who has not built his creed for himself, or who accepts any doctrine whatever until he can justify it logically. Here is the great and appalling change in modern England. Side by side are the conquests of knowledge and the conquests of criticism. He who has not seen this is yet a beginner in the history of the people around him.

We have said it before-those only who can compare the Germany of Prince Metternich with the Germany of Prince Bismarck, are fully alive to the method and moment of discussions which now occupy the English world of literature and science. For such men trace the practical changes extending over the breadth of the social order to certain past leaders of thought, whose influence on their immediate neighbours was but faintly discernible. They know that society is held together by unanimity of belief, and that thought must, in the end, prevail over merely mechanical action. Now this is the gist of our present matter. A new intellectual spirit has risen up in Protestant and Conservative England. It is a spirit which expends no little irony on the helplessness of creeds and institutions established by the Reformation, and it is bent on attaining freedom, in every sense, to contemplate the universe. It declares that the philosophy which

is to satisfy mankind must be wider than the Church Catechism, must be more in harmony with the nature of things than trust in the Thirty-nine Articles, or in the perfect fitness of the Bible to teach everything. It likens a Protestant's devotion to the written letter with a Catholic's steadfast obedience to living authority, and in neither does it take delight. To be sure, it knows Catholicity only through the bedimmed spectacles of its reforming grandfathers, and is pitiably in the dark as to the Catholic interior life. But it witnesses impartially, and after experience, to the cast-iron lifelessness of Bible Christianity, it demonstrates the folly of supposing that any book by itself can instruct and practically guide souls into perfection. It is as complete an enemy of vulgar Protestantism as the Catholic Church has been, but from opposite motives. Vulgar Protestantism is an absurd combination of reason and authority. It reasons (not with all the accuracy desirable) against the Council of Trent, and then submits to the Bible as interpreted by some current preacher. The more refined Protestantism which we are now resisting does not take offence at argument when employed against the Church, but fails to understand how the Reformers did not reason also against the Bible. It urges that all things should be tested by the inborn light which showed the hollowness of Roman pretensions. And the Bible! Have we not learned that the Book of Genesis melts in the testing-pot of recent criticism, and that the Four Gospels are the work of unknown syncretists in the second century? But, it is added, if you reject the dogmatic sense of the Testaments, do not bend under the yoke of such imperfect logic and metaphysics as you were taught at Oxford. Judge for yourselves in this also; learn that there are many logics (as notably the all-embracing logic of Hegel), and that there are some who deny logic altogether, as Comte and the Positivists. In like manner, do not abide in the trammels of your fixed Toryism and Whiggism. Look out into the world, and see how narrow are the formulas which rule your British constitution. But what need to multiply applications? The canon of pure thought once understood, you are equipped with all that can be necessary, if you will join thereto the resolution never to flinch from the truth. Here is the problem, and the way to solve it. England has lived according to a blind mechanical philosophy, or, rather want of philosophy, and has deemed it a matter of boasting that criticism and speculation did not count where real interests were at stake. Poetry and art have revealed nothing except the curious expedients by which some get money, and the ease with which people of position spend it.

Men

Religion has been a Sunday recreation, or, if that seem too light a word, has given a becoming solemnity to the status of a British subject. But a generation is come not ignorant of the outside world. England is no longer the China of our European confederation. She opens her doors to all, and especially to the visitors who throng from Germany. are found of the stamp of Thomas Carlyle, who translate to the general public what the philosophers have been thinking and speaking in Continental lecture-rooms, and at length Churchmen and Dissenters are aroused at the vision of another morning which disturbs their slumbers. We are in the Renaissance of the nineteenth century.

This is the latest Rationalism. Its adherents amongst the best sections of English society are growing in number and in boldness. The vigorous students of science, the travellers into many lands, the readers of ancient and modern literature, have, many of them, abandoned what they once held, nor entirely without causing pain to themselves and perplexity to others. The leisured classes have begun to display an unusual inclination to speculate in philosophy. Poetry, and even the lighter productions of art, threaten to lose their attraction. under the shade of thoughtfulness which has spread its wings above them. In the highest orders individual piety and sincerity of belief are not, indeed, extinct, but so perceptible is the influence of modern thought upon them, that literature, and much more conversation, has taken a fresh colouring, which promises to show more distinctly as time wears on. The classes which take rank immediately below the highest, and generally those engaged in trade or manufactures, have kept, in part, the tradition of fellowship in prayer and worship, but have also, in part, turned aside to follow the new doctrines. But, as commonly happens, the multitude change direction at a word of command and never stay to reflect on the sort of road which they have thus unperceivingly entered. Whilst still in the imagination that they hold with their fathers, or at any rate, are fulfilling the conscious promise of earlier years, they are letting go the Thirty-nine Articles, the Athanasian Creed, the inspiration of Scripture, the faith in a personal God. They falter even in what used to be so clear, the trust in an overruling Providence, in the efficacy of Prayer, in the supreme interests of a world to come.

There is yet little declared apostasy from the ranks of the Church of England, or of other bodies resembling it, which have never professed nor desired to exact from their members any real obedience of thought. All these have been convenient forms of unity; to persons of education outside the Catholic

Church they are still the only Christianity intimately known. As they are, also, most unsatisfactory, it is not wonderful that earnest thinkers are looking away from Revelation altogether. They find themselves in the circumstances and the attitude of well-meaning Pagans, to whom the established religion was an indifferent ceremony, whilst philosophy (or what they believed to be true) had no reference to any one but themselves as they fashioned their own lives. Indeed, there was more of authority left amongst the contemporaries of Cicero and Tacitus, for they felt some reverence, not shaken by an actual view of Socialism, towards the simple family life of their ancestors, and the self-authenticating affections of man to man. But now all truths have been called in question, and there is no principle thought to be unassailable since all have been assailed.

Imagine the vision which will grow and abide in a reflecting mind, after it has learned the habit of reading and seeing everything indiscriminately, and has never known how to use a separating sense of that decisiveness of rejection which Faith imparts to even ignorant Catholics. It will be, on the whole, a vision of evil, with but fragmentary and inconclusive adjustments of sight, and a spreading haze of confusion, under which objects lose their outline, and consequently their significance. As in a world where certain mathematical laws had been suspended, we might trace out the beginning of regularity well enough, but should be brought to a standstill by the inevitable mixture of necessary relations and new contingent circumstances, so a mind with blunted principles, even if not morally callous, will have lost the delicacy by which science is rendered efficient. In fact, what do we hear every day? Men complain that belief has gone from them, like a peculiarity that vanishes on a change of climate; they profess a readiness to hold the truth, but have relinquished all hope that they shall ever find it. Their language is inaccurate, we admit; but it is a sad thing to hear them describe the amazement of doubt under which they feel condemned to labour. The reality they look upon has become no better to them than Shelley's horrorstricken questioning:

If there should be

No God, no heaven, no earth, in the void world:

The wide, grey, lampless, deep, unpeopled world!

Within, what do they consciously discern in moments of uncertainty? They say some impersonal Law, which, though they comprehend no wherefore, they would shrink from disobeying, or, for their boldness, must suffer an inward agony-the

"domestica Furia " of ancient moralists. They seek the purpose of Life, and they think no answer reaches them, whether from the immensity of universal space or the depths of their own souls. They are moved to say so-it is far from the truthbecause the creeds of revolted churches have long been a mockery, stiffened into formalism, and the roar of contending unwisdom has not allowed them to cultivate the intelligence in which a Divine voice would speak more clearly. The testimony of mankind seems to them worthless, it is so contradictory; the disputes of metaphysicians have made them believe that philosophy can settle nothing at all; and the lights and darkness of nature are so intermingled that they cast down the spectroscope in despair, holding that its lines reveal no more than the instrument itself has given rise to. There is a bitter saying in Tacitus, "Ludibria rerum humanarum"; and they think it is warranted by a more intricate experience than his. To these men, reason, refinement, genius, persevering love, the gentle tenderness of home, the world's great ambitions, are good and to be cherished while they may, but they receive no fuller interpretation in a transfigured life to come. Years have their promise and their burden; still," the rest is silence."

II. Now it is evident to Catholics that a conflict such as this deserves pity, even though it implies moral as well as intellectual faultiness. We who spend our days in the quiet light, who have no need to question ourselves at every turn on the honestum and the pulchrum, but only to work as the pattern has been given us, can wish but one thing that all may share in our happiness; can regret but one thing-that so many, often our superiors in disposition of nature, are deceived by the fleeting shape of knowledge, till they learn to disregard their want of revelation and incur these woful penalties of self-conceit. It is incumbent on us to afford all the help we can in such cases as may present an opening for good, nor have we any inclination to judge those harshly who never saw Christianity in its legitimate form, or have been brought up so that they cannot recognize it. What, then, are we to say if permitted in any season to use words of simple humanity and brotherly counsel? Is this a case past the possibility of cure? We would not willingly think so. But the cure may

not be easy.

The form of contagion, as we have noticed, which now threatens English society, does not confine itself to the most refined or the most philosophical. It began in those high regions, but has spread downwards, till every one who reads a newspaper or a novel is in danger of taking it. Mr. Tyndall's "Scientific Fragments "-that melancholy specimen of infec

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