“ The tendency of humanitarianism as a motive apart from the higher life of the state, or apart from its impersonation in Christ as its head and leader, is to weaken individualism and to defeat the very end it wishes to subserve, the achievement of the rights of man. Humanity as a whole lacks the visible, tangible embodiment of the nation. It has not yet the consciousness of itself nor of its unity. ”

“ We can echo the sentiments expressed by a Christian Zionist, George Eliot, many years ago: “Revive the organic centre; let the unity of Israel which has made the growth and form of its religion be an outward reality. Looking towards a land and a polity, our dispersed people in all the ends of the earth may share the dignity of a national life which has a voice among the peoples of the East and the West—which will plant the wisdom and skill of our race so that it may be, as of old, a medium of transmission and understanding. ”

“ Materialists or physicists such as Tyndall and Huxley, or their counterparts on the Continent, would console us for the loss of religion by substituting the majesty of law. But the idea of law implies a law-giver or an intelligent and authoritative imponent of some kind. There is no majesty in a mere sequence, even the most invariable and on the largest scale, the existence of which alone physical science can prove.
The all-embracing philosophy of Mr. Herbert Spencer excludes not only the supernatural but theism in its ordinary form. Yet theism in a subtle form may be thought to lurk in it. ”

“ We know the cause of the disease; we know only too well its symptoms, but the enormous fatality (from twenty to twenty-five per cent.) speaks only too plainly of the futility of our means of cure, and yet in no disease has there been so great a revolution in treatment. The patient is no longer drenched to death with drugs, or bled to a point where the resisting powers of nature are exhausted. ”

“ THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE UNITED STATES
In our own beloved country we have every reason to be thankful that the liberty to worship God according to the dictates of conscience is guaranteed by the Constitution, and has entered deeply into the convictions of our fellow-citizens. The Catholic Church, by her own constitution, is deeply sympathetic with our national life and all that it stands for. She has thrived in the atmosphere of liberty, and seeks only the protection of the common law, that equal justice which is dealt out to all. ”

“ We can never make progress except by trying new methods. New methods must be tried either on man or on animals, and as the former is not allowable, the only way remaining to us is to test all new methods, drugs, and applications first upon animals. He who restricts, and, still more, he who would abolish our present experiments upon animals, is, in my opinion, the worst foe to the human race, and to animals, as well, for they, as well as human beings, obtain the benefit derived from the method. He may prate of his humanity, but he is the most cruel man alive. ”

“ But already in the last volume of his Positive Philosophy, when he begins to deal with human society, he maintains that “the individual man is an abstraction, and that there is nothing real but humanity”; and in his Positive Politics he treats this unity of mankind as not only real, but divine. In that work, moreover, he makes another step. Rejecting at once the obstructions of the individualists and those of the socialists, he rises to the conception of a social organism, which gives play to the competitive energy of individuals, and yet binds them together in its own more comprehensive life. ”

“ It has attempted the deification of humanity, as though the human race were worthy in itself of being an object of worship. It has exalted man at the expense of God, conceiving of humanity as alone immortal, as competent to steer its own course without supernatural direction. It has weakened the sense of nationality, has injured and endangered family life, has taken away the highest sanctions from morality, and has reduced religion from being a revelation from God to a purely subjective process in the soul of man, worthy of respect, but without authority. ”

“ Now, and for long, the States have taken their own part in history, fiction, poetry, and all other branches of letters. Germany came back into world literature again just at the ending of the eighteenth century, after unregarded ages of neglect. Russia and the Scandinavian North awoke about the same time, and daily widen their influence, as does Belgium in the sunshine of Maeterlinck. France, of course, has in all time been in the foremost rank; while to balance America, Russia, and the North, Italy and Spain have scarcely held the place which through so many centuries was their own. ”

“ THE JEWS AND JUDAISM The opening years of the nineteenth century found the Jew blinded by the light of a new sun, the rays of which were beating upon the Ghetto and were forcing him to take off, one by one, the many garments with which he had clothed himself during the hostile Middle Ages. ”

“ And so, it must be added, are the sanctions of ethics and moral law. It is when we turn to the state, to the moral personality of the nation, that we encounter other laws and living forces which restore what an empirical science or a transcendental humanitarianism has broken down. Here the supreme test is spiritual—the well-being of the nationality. The state must build upon the family as its corner-stone; it must enforce those moral laws which the history of nations, as well as human experience in its best estate, reveal to be the inmost expression of the normal life of man. ”

“ There is much excuse, indeed, in many cases for such unwillingness when we consider how often reason has presented itself as purely a critical or dissolving power, and how often abstract theories which grasp only one aspect of things have been set forth as complete explanations of religion or morality or some other of the higher interests of life. It has always to be kept in view that it is in something like immediate perception that truth is given in the first instance, and that philosophy, therefore, must always be in a sense toiling after the intuitions of faith. ”

“ All nations have their military fads, except, perhaps, the severely practical Germans. Russia has its dragoon organization, from which it is receding; America has her dynamite gun; the French have their submarine torpedo-boats. Our machine guns are not thought much more of by most Prussians than the steam-gun of 1844, ridiculed by Dickens in Martin Chuzzlewit. If great change was to have been made in the art of war by modern weapons, one would have thought that the first things to disappear would be all vestige of protective armor and the use of cavalry in the field. ”

“ To submit to any operation required then a heroism and an endurance which is almost incomprehensible to us now. All of the more modern, deliberate, careful, painstaking operations, involving minute dissection, amid nerves and blood-vessels, when life or death depends on the accuracy of almost every touch of the knife, were absolutely impossible. It was beyond human endurance quietly to submit one’s self for an hour, for an hour and a half, for two hours, or even longer, to such physical agony. ”

“ From every land of the Old and New Worlds hundreds of thousands have returned of their own volition to the ancient fold wherein we firmly believe is kept the sacred deposit of saving truth. They have come to us from the pulpits of opposing religions and from the workshops of an unbelieving science. Every condition of life, and both sexes, have sent us numerous souls. ”

“ EVOLUTION Among the great and fertile scientific conceptions which have either originated or become firmly established during the nineteenth century, the theory of evolution, if not the greatest of them all, will certainly take its place in the front rank. As a partial explanation (for no complete explanation is possible to finite intelligence) of the phenomena of nature, it illuminates every department of science, from the study of the most remote cosmic phenomena accessible to us to that of the minutest organisms revealed by the most powerful microscopes ”

“ Thus, in Kant’s theory, the two extreme views of humanity, as natural and as spiritual, as limited to a finite individuality, hemmed in by necessities on every side, and yet as possessing a universal capacity of knowing, and an absolute power of self-determination, these two views are presented in sharp antithesis, and at the same time held together as different aspects of one life. In fact, we have here, as it were, compressed into a nutshell, the result of the whole history of eighteenth-century individualism, which began by depressing man and ended by exalting him ”

“ We have fixed on sculpture as the most complete expression of Greek art; in other directions there is neither enough material nor enough research to give us a connected view. Not a single town, hardly a single house, in Greece has been excavated; there is no consecutive knowledge of the ordinary products and objects of life; and there is very little recorded of the discoveries of the tombs. The artistic interest of the sculpture and architecture has starved other branches of archæology, and for Greece more remains to be done than for some less celebrated lands. ”

“ At the same time, the progress of biology was bringing man to a consciousness that as a physical being he is only primus inter pares in the animal kingdom, and the decay of religious belief was making him realize his finitude, the limits of his natural existence, as, perhaps, he had never done before, at least never since the beginning of the Christian era. Earth seemed to be disconnected from heaven, and the human race thrown upon its own resources. By the new enlightenment all powers, ecclesiastical or political, were stripped of the mysterious sanctity that had once invested them. ”

“ PHYSICS On January 7, 1610, Galileo, turning his telescope towards Jupiter, was the first to see the beautiful system of that planet in which the universe is epitomized. He had already studied the variegated surface of the moon, and he had seen the spots upon the sun. A little later, in spite of the feeble power of his instrument, he had discovered that the sun rotates upon an axis, and something of the wonderful nature of the planet Saturn had been revealed to him. The overwhelming evidence thus afforded of the truth of the hypothesis of Copernicus made him its chief exponent. ”

“ It is to the credit of the government of the United States that the whole world is debtor to us, not only for the foremost medical library in the world, that of the surgeon-general of the army in Washington, but also for the magnificent index-catalogue, not only of the books, but all the journal articles in every language in the world. ”

“ Here the doctrines of Catholicism are eminently in accord with the right conception of human nature, the functions of authority and mutual help or charity, the duty to live, and the right to all the necessary means for that end. She is sympathetic, historically and naturally, to the toiling masses, who, after all, form everywhere the bulk of her adherents, and have been always the most docile and affectionate of her members. It is she who created in the world the practical working idea of a common humanity, the basis of all genuine social improvement. ”

“ None the less, Scott is the main stock of the fiction of the century. Men may now have more minute knowledge, though so wide a knowledge has none; may have more wit, if less humor; may eagerly hunt for all that Scott loathed and avoided in our animal nature; may, indeed must, practise a more careful style, but all the novelists are, willy-nilly, children of Scott and Miss Austen. ”

“ Tennyson, in short, had genius; new, as all genius is new, and no occasional defects of taste or temper can impair the splendor and richness of his gift to the world, nor the immortality of his fame.
His contemporary, Browning, had the misfortune to attract, by his faults, the people who wish to believe themselves clever, because they labor at appreciating passages which the poet had made obscure. Darkness is not depth, nor is obscurity a merit. ”

“ But Unknowableness in itself excites no reverence, even though it be supposed infinite and eternal. Nothing excites our reverence but a person, or at least a Moral Being. There lingers in Mr. Spencer’s mind the belief that the present limit of our knowledge is the veil of the Deity.
Had the Darwinian discoveries been known to Schopenhauer they would have conspired with the earlier discoveries of science and with his pitiless survey of the human lot to confirm him in the belief that this was the worst of all possible worlds. ”

“ I confine myself simply to the modern form of anti-Judaism, which has been dignified with the name of anti-Semitism. It is hard for a Jew to speak of these things with composure or with the judicial mind of a mere chronicler of events. Neither emancipation from without nor Reform from within has been able to stay the hand of the destroyer of Israel’s peace. It has been contended that in most countries the Jews were not ready to be emancipated; that in some the non-Jewish population was not sufficiently advanced to make emancipation effective. ”

“ Herbert Spencer calls the process the “survival of the fittest,” and though the term may not be strictly accurate in the case of any one species in any one year, yet when we consider that the struggle is going on every year, during the whole duration of each species, we cannot doubt that, on the whole, and in the long run, those which survive are among the fittest. The struggle is so severe, so incessant, that the smallest defect in any sense organ, any physical weakness, any imperfection in constitution, will almost certainly, at one time or another, be fatal. ”

“ ASTRONOMY In looking back over a century’s work in the oldest of the sciences, one is struck not only by the enormous advance that has been made in those branches of the science dealing with the motions of the heavenly bodies which were cultivated at least eight thousand years ago by early dwellers in the valleys of the Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates, but with the fact that during the century that has just passed away a perfectly new science of astronomy arose. By annexing physics and chemistry astronomers now study the motions of the particles of which all celestial bodies are composed ”

“ One mode of faith-healing in modern days, which passes under the remarkable name of Christian Science, is probably nothing more than mental suggestion under another name. “The patient is told to be calm, and is assured that all will go well; that he must try to aid the healer by believing that what is told him is true. The healer then, quietly but firmly, asserts and reiterates that there is no pain, no suffering, that it is disappearing, that relief will come, that the patient is getting well.” ”

“ Meanwhile the “emancipation” born of science had set in; people thought they knew all about everything; the elder Darwin could explain the universe without a God, quite as easily as any modern Darwinian, if not so elaborately. He may not have been always correct in his theories and facts, still, there they were, and they were “emancipating.” Yet, far from being laughed out of court by the gratifying progress of science, a more mystical religion and a life more austere had come in from the preaching of Wesley, who was practically the parent of our neo-Catholicism in its varying forms. ”

“ It follows that all explanations of phenomena can only be partial explanations. They can inform us of the last change or the last series of changes which brought about the actual conditions now existing, and they can often enable us to predict future changes to a limited extent; but both the infinite past and the remote future are alike beyond our powers. Yet the explanations that the theory of evolution gives us are none the less real and none the less important, especially when we compare its teachings with the wild guesses or the total ignorance of the thinkers of earlier ages. ”

“ They surely walk in the footsteps of Jesus, doing good wherever they go. The perennial note of sanctity in the Catholic Church shines especially in them. Content with food and clothing and shelter, they devote their lives, often in the very flower of youth and health and beauty, to the weak and needful members of Christian society. He must needs be a Divine Master who can so steadily charm into His service the purest and the most affectionate of hearts, and cause them to put aside deliberately for love of Him even the most justifiable of human attachments. ”

“ Positivism, the work of Comte, totally discards belief in God and treats theism in all its forms as merely a mode of contemplating phenomena and a step in the course of human progress. Yet the Positivist feels the need of a religion, and for the worship of God he substitutes the worship of Humanity. Humanity is an abstraction and an imperfect abstraction, the course of the human race having not yet been run. ”