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spectacle broke upon his eyes-that ministry of symbols, those channels of grace, that unending line of the Popes joining all times to Christ the Head of the Church. "A sublime construction!" he said, one which gave him the idea of Christian unity. This is that Christian unity which the sixteenth century had seen bartered away over a large part of Europe for something else. Gladstone added that thenceforward he began to feel his way towards a true notion of the Church. He never reached it. But you see the function of sacred art and ceremonial in speaking through the imagination to the mind as even a preacher might not have succeeded in doing.

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BENJAMIN. The children of generations that fell away seem to be making up now, in the imitation of Catholic rites and ceremonies, and fairness of liturgy and all beauty. They are falling into line.

ST. VICTOR. My dear Benjamin, falling into line requires a line to fall into; which, with intelligent people in matters of mind and will, means the clear apprehension of fixed truth and principle. Without a religious truth, infallibly presented and known to be true, all the conventions which are indulged in under the name and title of the "Good, the Beautiful and the True" are only a jelly-kind of movement, which cannot find a line to fall into. No fluttering of pretty practices avails aught if there is no substance of Sacraments behind. Pious devotions come to little if not pivoted on the Real Presence of Our Lord. All the talking and preaching possible is only beating the air if you are not there to give something, that men may be cured and healed and qualified to go and do something.

However, there is nothing to say against good as

pirations. The other day a non-conformist minister in England lamented the misery to which his co-religionists had been subject ever since the Reformation. Owing to the want of Catholic liturgy, art and beauty, they had been forced to exaggerate the value of what he called formulas and sermons, and of other rationalistic or argumentative aspects, which have given their temples the appearance of so many lecture-halls. Prayer, he said, and praise have subsided there into a rhetorical show or else dreary reading, where worshippers have been supplanted by critics, where spectators flank the affair with curiosity and staring, while the whole show inspires neither reverence nor silence nor the propriety of good manners. This minister went on to declaim against "the stupid cry of no-Popery." He contended that the beautiful and healthful symbolism of Popery was precisely what was needed. Simplicity, he added, did not consist in baldness and coarseness and starved sentiment. How do you like that?

BENJAMIN. Very well indeed! Have you any more?

ST. VICTOR. In Boston recently a minister descanted on what he called "The Unhappiness of Protestantism." He gave a lengthy description of the cheerfulness so evident in the Catholic Church. This subject, I see, is attracting the minds of outsiders, who, however, if they had read Digby's Ages of Faith, Mores Catholici, would have seen the facts abundantly illustrated and the reasons of the facts indicated. But, as to the Boston minister-he was of opinion that such cheerfulness was quite in keeping with the announcement of the Incarnation: "Behold! I bring you good tidings of great joy." Here, he did not observe that the continuance of

1 Luke 2, 10.

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such effects resulting from the Incarnation was due to the continuance of the Sacraments, particularly that of Confession and the forgiveness of sins. This and the other Sacraments bring the Incarnation home to every generation which comes into existence, and they draw out for every relay of humanity those effects direct from the Incarnation, which like a living spring wells out direct with its waters to the thirsty traveller of yesterday, to-morrow or a hundred years hence, without any reference whatever to all the other travellers coming in between. The Boston minister alluded also to the gloominess of the Puritans, who went through life humming their surly hymns. But he explained the gloom, such as Puritanism has favoured and such as Catholicism has not, with a distinction borrowed from Carlyle. The distinction seems to involve no difference. He said that the Puritan Roundheads had blessedness, but not happiness. So he whistled the difficulty off, by implying that the blessed in heaven need not be happy, and that Catholics on earth, if happy, need not be blessed. Well, there is some truth in that, if he was rating millionaires and speculators as his types of blessedness.

CHAPTER XIX

RATIONALISM AND NATURALISM

BENJAMIN. Well, because I proposed a question about Religion, you have analysed and dissected most of what is in us. If there is anything left that is not yet cut up, I suppose it is our reason. This you began with as your foothold, or rather as your stronghold; and you have never left it. Why not finish the operations? Take Reason now, and let us see what will become of it.

ST. VICTOR. Oh, reason is not the only thing left. There is that in which reason is rooted, the principle from which it comes, and to which it always must adhere. That principle is called Nature. Like reason, all the other faculties which we have considered, such as the imaginative and sentimental, are also endowments of nature.

For what is Nature? It is the principle of activity and of work. As by Nature we mean the original Being or fund of existence in us, all the active powers or faculties originate in this fund, and adhere to this stem of being. Hence, if you want things analysed to the last elements you must go beyond man's reason to man's nature. Again, if you want to take things not only at their positive value for that they are, but also at their negative rating for what they ought not to be, then you have the excrescences or extravagances of both reason and nature; or what are called respectively Rationalism and Naturalism.

Take them at their positive values. Then Reason is the spiritual power which sees truth, which deduces

it from premises and antecedents, which analyses and tests it; and, in matters of moral life, presents the dictates of truth as the guide of action to the will. By the Will we mean that reasonable appetite for desiring things which is the proper complement of a reasonable intelligence knowing things. Now, as all that is plain, it is enough for the positive or constructive view of Reason and Nature.

What concerns us more is a negative aspect of these things, when they are not discharging their functions rightly. They give us the outgrowths of what is called Rationalism from reason, and Naturalism from nature. I say outgrowths, like those excrescences which run out so awkwardly from the cactus in all directions. But those of the cactus are not organically unsound.

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BENJAMIN. Now that will suit me; because, a while ago, I read under this heading of Rationalism a set of items, which I should be glad to understand. Under the title of "The Recrudescence of Rationalism," a cry of alarm was raised, directly by an Anglican clergyman, but indirectly as an echo of what Cardinal Vaughan had called attention to before his death. It was reported that huge editions, some of them amounting to 30,000 copies in one impression, were being sold of Huxley's Essays and Lectures, Clodd's Pioneers of Evolution, Laing's Modern Science and Modern Thought, Matthew Arnold's Literature and Dogma, Haeckel's Riddle of the Universe, Herbert Spencer's Education, Grant Allen's Evolution of the Idea of God. At the same time, the American public wanted more literature in the style of Draper's Conflict between Science and Religion; and Dr. A. D. White, ambassador of the

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