a group of priests

“ And if, among the struggles and controversies through which it has arisen and has had to defend its existence, it has proceeded to excesses, these cannot be reduced by combating it as you are doing, by opposing to it another and a bastard Socialism. Two forces which are naturally opposed cannot be fused, and the struggle between them will endure until the younger and the stronger has destroyed the other. If you fear Socialism, let Catholics penetrate its organizations and institutions, and import into them the calm spirit of peace and of Christian love. ”

“ Nor, apart from the present decisive influence of the absolutist idea a absolutist party within the Roman Church, is it unnatural that the attempt to revive in Christianity the temper of Catholic intelligence and sympathy should be made within that Church, just as it is being made elsewhere. Rome is still the vital nucleus of that society which exists as an instrument for the making of the kingdom of God. She alone reaches out into all lands, speaks through all languages, reconciles all differences of human condition and circumstance in the unity of one great human hope. ”

“ You have thought well indeed to restore to Catholics, after more than thirty years of exclusion from public life, the sacred, natural, and inviolable right to the vote—not, however, that they may use it as free citizens, freely supporting the democracy in its holy aspirations, but only when the candidature of some Conservative happens to be in peril. In the present state of affairs, you have not thought of democracy as the genuine product of Christian brotherhood, as the force of the future. ”

“ Every one in these days is dinning into your ears accusations of modernism, of that bête noire which no one knows, of that horrible spectre which every one believes he has recognized, but which no one can define otherwise than as "the heresy which contains all the heresies and errors of the past"; and you blindly listen to their pious indignation, and will not see that most frequently these defenders of faith and morals are slaves of incontinence, of insincerity, of sloth, of ignorance. Yet against them not even the authority of Bishops of proved holiness and learning is of any avail. ”

“ Now, apart from the fact that for us there is no charity without faith, because charity is riches, fruitfulness, fulness of life lived in harmonious communion with the Universal, and that to be such it demands a faith, great, immense, and infinite as God is great, immense, and infinite, we merely reply to you that our tenderness for the unbeliever is not greater than that which we feel for Christ, for the Church, for yourself. ”

“ At times an organism, when once the crisis is past and it has been purified of those elements which are alien and hostile to its nature, emerges to a more vigorous life. And we, who still feel all the riches and the inexhaustible power of Christianity in virtue of an intimate experience which overcomes every human argument to the contrary, have, in answer to your paternal call, girt ourselves with confidence to the task of imparting to the minds of others, and helping them to feel, this ineffable experience.
But to-day men exhibit a spirit of distrust and suspicion with regard to us. ”

“ Yet it is not from Protestantism in its narrow and ecclesiastical sense that the Roman Church can derive that which she most needs, just as it is not in an ultramontane Romanism that Protestantism can find that Catholic spirit and temper after which it longs. The world of religious reality, the world of moral aspiration and endeavour, has widened out beyond the range of these two conflicting forces. They both alike have to reconquer a world which is steadily slipping away from their grasp. And to reconquer that world they must understand it and help it to understand them. ”

“ You have preferred the men of the syllogism to the men of profound and positive knowledge as though the salvation of the Church lay, not in the objective establishment of historical truth, as your predecessor desired it should, but in maintaining intact traditions which are devoid of meaning and foundation; you have regarded as a blasphemer the man who was able to demonstrate the insufficiency of the proofs of the miraculous translation of the Holy House of Loretto—as if the worship paid to the Blessed Virgin were founded upon its historical reality. ”

“ For us, profoundly Christian souls, religion, far from being a vague, mystical feeling which soothes the spirit and isolates it in a barren egoism, is a Divine reality, which kindles into life and exalts the souls of men, and, knitting them together in a bond of brotherhood, directs their life towards a supreme and common goal. ”

“ The evolution of dogma, we have insisted, is an evident historical fact which corresponds with the laws of the evolution of the human mind. No one knows the necessity of dogmas better than we who are devoting all our powers to the perpetuation of their life. As for theology, we affirm that there always has been a theology, and always will be; and, moreover, we also are engaged in making a theology.
Therefore, as a result of our study of history, we are bound to hold that theology is not identical either with scholasticism, or with Christianity, or with dogmas. ”

“ Her dissolution would be the dissolution of organized Christianity over a large part of the Western world. Even Protestants ought to recognize that Protestantism is but her provincial ally, witnessing for a season in certain outposts of her dominions to the claims of truth and freedom which she, in her perverted conception of the method of unity, has for a moment forgotten or denied. Whatever she may think, Protestantism has something to teach her which it has learned through four centuries of stern and relentless struggle against her arrogant and overbearing mood. ”

“ Religion, if it is to be accepted, cannot impose itself by means of a syllogism. It presupposes the rationabile obsequium without which it has no moral value for those who profess it. God, revelation, the Church, dogma, cannot be imposed from without by reasoned arguments. The soul must first seek them through its own free action, must find their reasons and learn their worth under the stimulus of its own religious experience, and bring this experience into relation with the religious experience of the human spirit throughout the ages. ”

“ As Christians, we accept the authority of the Church, as the careful dispenser of the deposit of eternal truth inherited from Christ, to regulate and govern our religious life, and to interpret and supply its living needs and claims. We accept, further, the dogmas and rites by which all souls, in the communion of faith, hope, and charity, may participate in the life of the living Christ. ”

“ Father of all things by creation; His wisdom manifested in the order and harmony of the universe, and afterwards revealed in the person and humanity of Jesus, Who died sacrificing Himself for us; and His love manifested in the revelation of the wisdom of God, and still continually manifesting itself in that breath of Divine life which stirs in our spirits as they participate in the society, visible or invisible, of His faithful worshippers. ”

“ In this upward movement Christianity ought to be the centripetal force, spurring on and leading forward humanity in the course of the various stages of its evolution, penetrating with its spirit and moulding with its Divine forms the manifestations peculiar to each of them, yet not wholly identifying itself with any of them. And he who regards as definite forms of Christianity what are only expressions peculiar to the civilization which at a given moment it has made its own, is inevitably co-operating towards its ruin. ”

“ They do not deny the need of a metaphysic, the craving of the human mind to conceive somehow of the ultimate reality. What they do deny is the sufficiency of any metaphysical explanation of the universe. For such explanations proceed on the assumption that it is the province of the intellect to establish an absolute conception of reahty which will be valid before all experience, and even apart from all experience. ”

“ Not only are the ancient cathedrals, which the piety of free and faithful peoples in the Middle Ages raised to the Blessed Virgin and to sainted patrons, deserted; not only do men no longer care to resort to religion for strength and light for their souls, when harassed by everyday fatigues and struggles; not only have respect and veneration for the sacred things which men learned to love from their cradle disappeared ”

“ For us Christianity is the highest expression of religion thus conceived, and of Christianity in its turn we consider Roman Catholicism to be the amplest realization. With the affirmation of Christianity as life, we affirm also that it cannot be a mere intellectual abstraction, and, therefore, "the pure Gospel" of which you speak, "stripped of the explanations of theology," is not for us a reality, since, if it wishes to be reality and life, it must become externalized in forms derived from similar expressions of ordinary human activity. ”

“ The demonstrative power of the syllogism once placed in doubt, it was soon banished from the field of the positive sciences; and man, abandoning every attempt at a rational reconstruction of the cosmos, sought to find in himself, in the demands of his own spirit, in his affections, in all the stir of the energies of his own subconscious ego, the practical reason of his own actions, the direction and sure guide of his life. ”

“ If we are truly convinced of our faith, not only ought we to have no fear of science, which, when it is true and certain, is itself also an emanation of the Divine Truth, but we ought also to hope from such control for an ever more living light upon the truths which form the pivot of our religious life. ”

“ The tenderness which in the face of contemporary agnosticism has forced us to bring to it the good news which, without knowing it, it yet loves and desires, is the tenderness which drove Paul to proclaim to the worshippers of the "unknown God" that GOD Whom, though they knew Him not, they yet worshipped—not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in whose name Peter spoke to the men of Israel, but that GOD, Lord of heaven and earth, whose spirit and life are the spirit and life of the universe; that GOD who is not far from every one of us, "in Ipso enim vivimus movemur et sumus." ”