OUR PROTESTANT CONTEMPORARIES.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume II, Issue 92, 30 January 1875, Page 9

OUR PROTESTANT CONTEMPORARIES.

FAITH AND REASON. There was never much difficulty in adjusting the claims of faith and reason as long as the question was discussed by men who possessed both. Such men were, in fact, the only persons qualified to discuss it at all. Nobody proposes to compare two languages together who is only imperfectly acquainted with one of them. .But tnis is what our contemporary Rationalists do every day. Perhaps it was for tMs reason, among others, that Samuel Taylor Coleridge said of them :—" Rationalists, so-called, in the very outset deny all reason, and leave us nothing but degrees to distinguish us from brutes." Yet they more than insinuate that they alone possess reason, or know how to use it. Perhaps they really believe what they say. Such a delusion is, in their case, natural. St. raul tells us of men, quite as able as any of our modem scientists, who were "delivered up to a reprobate sense " because " they did not like to retain God in their minds." Reason without faith is apt to finish in that way. Professing to extend, it always ends, as we learn from Kant, by limiting the field of human knowledge Plato could see, long before Kant, that a certain order of truths was beyond the grasp of reason, unless it was supplemented by a gift wkwhke no t know how to obtain, but which he rightly called "Divine Revelation." Aristotle was able to annouSce-l Jiiuics vi 12— that," the >oul cannot acquire a habit of right vision without moral virtue." Our moral Pagans have lost even the slender stock of truth wMch Plato and Aristotle possessed. A writer in the 'Pall Mall Gazette' lately occupied four columns of that journal with a criticism upon " The Vatican Coun™»?fi ?• a ? d sea5 eaS .° n ;" ?e? c had no about his own qualifications for the task. We should have been surprised if he nad. People who believe in nothing else had no difficulty at all in believing m themselves. The gentleman whom we are goin<* to quote has not much esteem for the reason of other people, but allows unlimited confidence in Ms own. The definitions of the Vatican Council are for him only " vapid common-places," of which his subtle and penetrating intellect easily detects the flimsy character. It is a gift he has, and he is willing that the world should profit by it. Tell him that the grave and thoughtful men who accepted these definitions had consumed their whole lives in pondering questions wMch he has never pondered at all, and ho will reply, as he did not long ago to one of their number, that you are beneath Ms notice." What is the use of such colossal talent as ins except to correct the mistakes of the rest of mankind ? He is, in tact, the universal Eyo, and knows it. " I think," he says • I can imagine ; " " tMs cannot be ; " « I do not suppose ; " " this theory appears to me ; " "I have studied;" "it is a great puzzle tome !; end so on through four columns. If he talks so much about himself it is probably because he has a pleasing conviction that nothi ag else is worth talking about. The sum of his talk is tMs, tnat taith is a cMmera, and that reason " must be all or nothing" Peoplj who know anything of the Mstory of human thought are aware that whoever attempted to make reason "all" has nnished, ;,t least as respects the Mghest problems of human existence, by making it "nothing." The philosophers of antiquity did so, ard confessed it. They gave up the whole question in despair, iet they were not wanting in intellect. The same thing nas happ<ned in our own day, and under our own eyes, "The great object of human thought," ssiys the writer in the < Pall Mall trazette, "the only one almost- that permanently interests, all

really active minds is the great problem of human existence, good and evil right *uid wrong, what? whence? whither. And what SkE^kT* done .f° war d s solution of this transcendent thought ? The answer is, nothing whatever. The only result of continually seeking to know," Mr B Herbert Spencer announces, is "a deepened conviction of the impossibility of knowing." Such XiSfjS"? 4^ num ?i 18 ° f rea f° n wh en it pretends to be « all or XSSS' ~7°? S aff o^S the slightest assistance in determining the great problem of human existence," it not only confesses its own impotence, but affect to rejoice in it. It makes total S^^^^«+ ?Ce a J? ty o nd a P rivile S e - "X is alike our highest ffSffilJS^T^ « and our highest duty to rfgard that through which all things exist as The Unknowable:' „ rt . t^ 8 , 18 wha f l^° n ? lwa ys «omes to when it is made " all or nothing, does not this uniformity of result, at once so dismal and bo ludicrous, suggest the idea that perhaps it has been improperly ShSL £*"* 'TOllT 011 *"? empl °J ed yes »° hel P whatever toS £JZ£ a TT 8 * question ever proposed to human intelligence, and always ends by frankly confessing its own failure, may there not be something else, as Plato suspected, which is able to supplement its mcapacity? The question is eminently practicaL The most yigonous intellects in all ages, including oui own, have SKySI. 1 * m a J? rma^ l e - T^y »°t only profess to have solved "the great problem of human existence," but tell us how it is done. The countless volumes in which they speak of faith and its objects are among the most splendid monuments of human genius. Faith, they tell us, is a gift which never contradicts right reason, though it takes cognisance of truths which lie outside its sphere. It is an intellectual gift, but wholly distinct from mere reason, not subject to its deplorable aberrations, and quite as strong ua the most illiterate peasant as in the greatest philosopher. detain him in eternal darkness than ascend into the region of light %WW 5 / aith - ?<*>& *O1 interfere with his chofce. Elephants, he says, "will not breed in captivity," and he "would rather give up the process of thinking altogether » than confine his own elepnantine reason within "the prison-yard which the Pope and has priests have marked out as its place of exercise." ite will not herd with such captives as St. Augustine, St Thomas Aqumas, St. Bernard and St. Philip Neri. He Sws, butiHS much impressed by the fact, that a very distinguished dweller in that prison-yard, who never suspected that he was in prison, was not ashamed to submit 3us vast intellect to the control of faith and the infallible authority of the Church. Bossuet understood that He to whom we belong has as much right to the submission of our reason as of our will. "It never occurred to him," our journalist observes, "tba,t it was not the proper function of the Church to hamper human reason." We doubt if he did. Bossuet who had almost as much genius as the lawyers of the " Pall Mall Gazette ' a ?xJT? *?~ °® read .^h admiration long after the hist number of that instructive print has been consumed as waste paper, would have told his mtic that-the proper function of the Church is not to hamper reason, but to save it from committing suicide He knew, as other men of genius had known, that she is the guardian of certain revealed truths, which do not tolerate questions simply because they are revealed. He knew also that if they are received by faith, on the authority of the Church, they are not received simply because she teaches them. To many she teached them in vain. Infidels and heretics often know what she teaches, but do not^ receive it, because they do not possess what Holy Scripture calls " the precious gift of faith." Christians, of whatever nation! do receive it, not by constraint, but virtue of that interior illumination which faith kindles in the soul. All who have it, of whatever race or nation, are conscious of it, feel its power, exult in its supernatural light. When the sort of people who -write in the 'Pall Mall Gazette tell them that they cannot have it, because there is no such thing, they only see, in such delirious speech, a fresh proof of the unutterable misery of those who have it not The testimony of those who possess the gift of faith outweighs the ignorant scepticism of those who do not. Even Sir William Hamilton confessed that "Knowledge is an inferior ground of assurance to natural belief." Like Plato, he saw that to determine the problem of human existence something else is wanted besides f^f™ £,? lan i , wh< k Can seri(msl y a^m, like the writer in the Pall Mall Gazette,' that reason must be all or nothing," knows as little about reason as he does about faith; and when he adds that the existence of certain fixed truths, revealed by God and witnessed by the Church, "hampers reason," it is as if he contended that a lighthouse is the confusion of mariners, and a hinderance to the navigation of the sea. It would not be more absurd to maintain that the postulates of the geometrician close the door of his own %"%£*'' *? I L n ?£ *% Wh f h obscures but the want oflt Faith in the truths of Revelation never impede the progreslof true science, and never will. In our own age, as in every other? there is not a brmch of human knowledge which is not Is eagerly IS vestagated by the Catholic as by the unbelieving or heretical student, witft the full approval and acquiescence of theChSch but as reason, .according to Kant, is "subject to inevitable delusion » and continually substitutes its own assumptions for facts *nA hardly any two modern philosophers are of one mind, it 'is an enormous advantage to the Catholic that he alone possesses a te^t SISS^'FTi! conchlßions of "reason" can be checked id corrected. The foolish newspapers, which say one tiling to-day and another to-morrow, and think that man's noblest pri^ ff efsthe right to be deceived, may tell their readers tlmt the^C Wh hampers reason, but they only display their own incurable foUv The Church, as even Mr. Froude remarks, had for centuries "Sfc monopoly of learning » What she fears is not knowledge, £

ignorances and as to liberty, whether of the intellect or the conscience, the experience of our own age proves that people who wish to curtail both always begin by attacking the authority which is able to defend both. « If we take a broad view," says Mr. Lecky, in his book on Rationalism, "of the history of liberty since the establishment of Christianity, we find that the ground of conflict was at first personal, and at a later period political liberty, and that in the earlier stage the Catholic Church was the special repretentative of progress." Such is the confession even of non-Catholics Hkeßanke, Guizot, Hallan, and Macaulay, when their own indsment is not fatally blinded by an ignoble bondage to a sect, a school, or a party. "It is historically certain," says Dr. Nevin, a well-known American Lutheran minister, in the 'Mercerburg Keview, "that European society, as a whole, in the period before ttie -Reformation, was steadily advancing in the direction of a rational, safe liberty." If in our own day liberty is everywhefe menaced, it is not by the Church, but by her enemies. They perfectly understand, in Berlin and elsewhere, that if they wantio gag liberty they must first get rid of her. The newspapers dispute this truth. They know that if people should ever recognize it their occupation would be gone. They live, and design to live, by flattering the prejudices of the many. If the Irish Bishops publish a noble protest against the gross philosophy proclaimed the other day in Belfast, the 'Times/ instead of thanking them, flippantly observes that "the public need only inquire under whose guidance science reached this point, at which she now commands the attention of the Roman Catholic Church, and compels the Pope to bless colleges founded to teach the doctrines of Galileo." Its readers will, no doubt, be quite content with this specimen of what Charles Lamb calls " superficial omniscience." It is, however, just possible that some of them may have read Dr. Gladstone's essay on Points of Supposed Collision between Scripture and Natural Science. He also discusses the case of Galileo, but is not quite so shallow and uncritical as the • Times,* perhaps because he appealed to more exacting readers. " The Reformed Church," he observes, "sided with the Vatican in this matter, and had we been living in the beginning of the seventeenth century, we too should have felt that the difficulty was a serious one." The difficulty of which the Church was bound to take account in the interest of human souls has passed away, and now, as Dr. Gladstone adds, "the Copernican theory is taught alike in Protestant schools of divinity and in Jesuit colleges." This is a mode of treating the subject which would not have suited the ' Times,' because it tends to remove, and not to confirm, ignorant and unreflecting prejudice. When we see how the writers in the Protestant newspapers, whether secular or ostensibly religious, use what they call their "reason," and to what results it conducts them, we understand what the French editor of St. Thomas meant when he said : "Le monde a encore plus besom de la raison que de la f oi."— •< Tablet.' *