'There is no degradation so abject as the submission of the eternal interests of the soul to the private authority or dictation of any man or body of men, whatever may be their titles. Every right sentiment in our breast rises up in abhorrence against it. 'A Church which is not of divine origin, and claims assent to its teachings or obedience to its precepts on its own authority, is an insult to our understandings, and deserves the ridicule of all men who have the capacity to put two ideas together. 'A Church that claims a divine origin, in order to be consistent, must also claim to be unerring; for the idea of teaching error in the name of the Divinity is blasphemous. 'A Church, if it deserves that title, must yield us assistance, and not we the Church. The Church that needs our assistance we despise. Only the Church which has help from above for mankind, and is conscious of it, is a divine institution. 'A Church that has its origin in heaven is an organ of divine inspiration and life to humanity. For religion is not only a system of divinely given truths, but also the organ of a divine life. Life and its transmission is inconceivable, independent of an organism. The office of the Church, therefore, is not only to teach divine truths, but also to enable men to actualise them. 'If entrance into the Church is not a step to a higher and holier life, the source of a larger and more perfect freedom, her claims do not merit a moment's consideration. Away with the Church that reveals not a loftier manhood, and enables men to attain it. 'The object of the Church authority is not to lay restraints on man's activity, but to direct it aright; not to make him a slave, but to establish his independence: the object of Church authority is to develop man's individuality, consecrate and defend his rights, and elevate his existence to the plane of his divine destiny. 'Divine religion appeals to man's holiest instincts, and inspires the soul with a sublime enthusiasm. A Church without martyrs is not on equality with the institution of the family or state; for they are not wanting in heroes. A Church that ceases to produce martyrs is dead. 'Hearts are aching to be devoted to the down-trodden and suffering of the race. Breasts are elated with heroic impulses to do something in the noble cause of truth and God. And shall all these aspirations and sentiments, which do honour to our nature, be wasted, misspent, or die out for want of sanction and right direction? Who can give this sanction? Who can give this direction? No one but God's Church upon earth. This is her divine mission. 'In concert with the voice of all those who are conscious of their humanity, we demand a visible and divine authority to unite and direct the aspirations and energies of individuals and nations to great enterprises for the common welfare of men upon earth and for eternity.' ورو These demands of an earnest seeker Mr. Hecker fearlessly allows to be admissible, and boldly promises to satisfy. The Catholic, he says, admits all this; and as a theologian he is right. It is quite beside the purpose to urge that the nature which Mr. Hecker describes is not mere human nature, without any supernatural helps, but nature assisted by tradition of a primitive revelation, by the grace which God denies to none, and by the atmosphere of a Christian civilisation. The question is not, whether the aspirations described by Mr. Hecker are those of a nature in puris naturalibus, or of the nature of a Christian unattached, with many a rag and remnant of revealed truth worked into his system; the question is, are they not, in fact, the aspirations of the non-Catholic inquirers with whom Mr. Hecker has to deal? Nor, again, ought any one to object to Mr. Hecker, that though he adopts the terms and phrases of the Rationalists and Transcendentalists, and uses their propositions as the foundation of his argument, yet he does not use them in the same sense as they do, and therefore he may do more harm by seeming to admit their principles, than good by proving that from the same principles, differently developed, Catholicity may be shown to be the answer to human needs. Of course he does not use the principles in the same sense, otherwise he would develop them in the same way. The Transcendentalist starts, like Mr. Hecker, from the principle that nature aspires to God; but because nature cannot find God for itself, Transcendentalism, unless it goes beyond nature, must put up with a very strange God and a stranger religion. A story is told of two Americans of this school going to see Elssler dance. "Margaret," quoth he, "this is poetry." "No, Ralph," rejoined she, "it is religion." Nature aspires to God, and turns aside to a ballet. No, says Mr. Hecker, remember your first principles; carry them out. If they lead to absurdity in one direction, try them in another; you are more certain of the truth of your principles than of the truth of your deductions from them. We admit the same foundation; you build upon it your system, I build upon it the necessity of the Catholic Church: compare our processes, our arguments, and see whose is best, whose satisfies the wants of the soul most completely. Meditate on your principles more deeply; understand them more thoroughly; and see whether they do not lead my way rather than yours. There is nothing in all this to give unbelievers the least handle for supposing that Mr. Hecker admits their principles as they understand them. As they understand them, they do not lead to Mr. Hecker's conclusions; when they see these conclusions deduced from them, they must review their own, and distinctly affirm either that their ballets, or their mystification, or their dreams of progress, are the things which nature aspires to,-in which case they prove themselves not to be of the number for whom Mr. Hecker writes; or they must be loyal to their nature, and own that now at last they have found a religion which satisfies the demands of their reason and their heart; that now they see how nature can rise above nature, how God has bridged over the impassable gulf, and answered the cry of His creatures. The manliness and boldness of Mr. Hecker's method is shown quite as much in the willingness with which he acknowledges good wherever he finds it, and finds out the mission which men outside the Church have accomplished. Thus of Dr. Channing he speaks: 66 To expose the character of this religion, hostile to man's nature, and which cloaked itself with the garb of evangelical Christianity, and to induce men to throw off its awfully oppressive and degrading servitude by exciting in them the moral sense, by stimulating the consciousness of their manhood, and by exalting the dignity of man, -this was the task of Dr. Channing. His mission, therefore, was a great, good, and noble one; and nobly he performed it.” Of Mr. Emerson : "Mr. Emerson's appeals are the voice of an outraged conscience and an oppressed reason, claiming their rights and freedom in tones of manly sincerity and courage. This attitude excites admiration ; and in view of the wretched tenets he was taught to believe in his early childhood, one may easily overlook the one-sided views and the exaggerations uttered in protest against them. Certain passages in his writings shock all well-regulated and genuine religious feeling; but indulgence may even be extended here, for these are only counter-statements of greater indignities offered to God by a false Christianity. Honour is due to his boldly upholding the worth and dignity of man; yet it is equally a subject of deep regret, that perversion of his splendid abilities to the circulation of the abominable theories of the German pantheistical atheists." The Church is large and wide; she surrounds and envelops our nature; she catches hold of one man by one point, of another by another. She has sympathies for the anxious inquiring Rationalist or Transcendentalist, as well as for the Puseyite or the Russian. She has her method of speaking to the heart of the one as well as of the other. In all kinds and developments of nature she finds points of contact-hooks to which she may attach her cords of love. But boldness, manliness, and largeness of view are not the only features of excellence of this book: terseness, strength, very often wit, especially in the short summings-up of the principles that have been discussed. The following is the sum of Fichte's system: "Philosophy defined in the spirit of Fichte would be: The dialogue of a man with his own shadow. And God is nothing else than man's intuition of his own nature considered as an independent existence. In keeping with his transcendental philosophy, Fichte, at the close of one of his celebrated lectures at Berlin, announced the subject of the subsequent evening as follows: 'To-morrow evening, gentlemen, I will construct God.' Again, the Protestant doctrine of the inherent evil of every act performed by man, as summed up in the eighth of the Thirty-nine Anglican Articles, is thus stated: "Works done by unregenerate men are sinful.' 'Yet the neglect of them is displeasing to God.' It follows, then, that we displease God by not doing sinful works.' Such is the manifest absurdity, impiety, and blasphemy of the purified Christianity taught by the great Gospel Doctors.' The best compendium of these wretched tenets is the following: 'You shall and you sha'n't, You can and you can't, You will and you won't; You'll be damned if you don't.'" Our last quotation shall be one of more historical interest, showing, from the confessions of Protestants, the results of Protestantism in the United States: "If more evidence were needed of the wretched failure of Protestant Christianity in this country, we would refer the reader to a remarkable report of five Protestant Episcopal Bishops on a memorial addressed to their body by some of its most distinguished ministers and laymen, which 'proceeds on the assumption that the Episcopal Church, confined to the exercise of her present system, is not adequate to do the work of the Lord in this land and in this age.' Among communications from their own members, there are a few from eminent clergymen of different names.' We give a specimen from one entitled, 'From a Baptist divine :' 6 "The present state of the Christian Church, and its relation to the world, is anomalous, and almost shocking to a Christian. Especially is this the case in this country. Here is no persecution; the Word of God is open; ministers more numerous than in any Protestant country, and working ministers than in any Papal country, I presume. There is nothing visible to prevent the universal dominion of Christianity; and what is the result? The number of professors of religion is diminishing in all our sects. The churches are coming to a stand for want of ministers. There is hardly a distinction observable between Christians and other men in practice, so far as all the forms of worldliness are concerned. The conscience of Christians, in too large a proportion of cases, is below the average of men who have no guide but natural conscience. Let a case arise in which Christians and other men come into contact, and the Christian will do things which an honourable man would despise. Το ask an honourable man of no profession to be converted, meaning that he should be such a man as many whom he sees professing Christianity, would be frequently hardly less than insulting. Hence infidelity abounds, and waxes strong. Humanity is rather showing itself out of the Church than in it. Men care more for their political parties than for the precepts of Christ; and on every political question, in Congress and out of it, sacrifice one to the other. 6 This is abnormal. Christ and His apostles never contemplated it. In twenty or thirty years, at the present rate of diminution, the candlestick will be removed out of its place. The Church has no conversions, and no hold on the masses. The most successful church-building is that which includes the poor by necessity.' . . . His communication ends with the frank acknowledgment of the fact, that 'If what we see is all Christianity can do, it is a failure.'" With this we must close, recommending the book to our readers as perhaps the most important controversial work for the present day that we have yet had to review. IDEOLOGY OF ST. THOMAS. Essay on the Origin of our Knowledge, according to the Philosophy of St. Thomas. By John Walker. London: Richardson and Son. In the contests of metaphysicians about the "origin of ideas," the maxim that "truth lies in the middle" is constantly illustrated. Man is neither an angel nor a brute: though he has, on the one hand, what is proper to angels, a spiritual soul; and on the other hand, what is proper to brutes, a material body, yet it has been the temptation of one school of philosophers to forget that he has a soul, and of the other to forget that he has a body. In company with Mr. Walker's treatise, which we have placed at the head of this article, there is lying before us a little French work on Psychology, in which the author characteristically begins, "L'homme, c'est l'âme humaine." That is one extreme. Had he been of the opposite school, he would have probably commenced somewhat in this strain: "Qu'est ce que c'est que l'homme? L'homme c'est la matière organisée," as in truth the materialists actually held. Plato taught that ideas were born in us. Aristotle taught that the mind was originally blank, and was wholly stocked by sensible experience. Malebranche went so VOL. IX.-NEW SERIES. E |