Part 36
A Catholic layman of the same distinguished family, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, threw in his lot with the patriots from the beginning, and by word and deed served the cause of American liberty, while he lived to see it flourish and inform more and more the minds and hearts of the first generation of American citizens. In future centuries, as in this, his name will be held in honor and benediction as a signer of the Declaration of Independence. His Catholic belief and conduct will forever be a potent encouragement to the children of his own faith. He was the first layman to contribute notably to the cause of Catholic education, and the native formation of the priesthood, by the establishment of a college for that purpose.
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND EDUCATION
We have done our best in these ten decades to provide the best education for our people and our priests. Intimately convinced that general education without religion is destined to be an evil rather than a blessing, we have created all over the United States a system of primary education in parochial schools that has cost us and yet costs us the gravest sacrifices and entails the heaviest solicitudes. Yet we feel that we are serving the cause of God and country by indoctrinating our Catholic youth with persuasions of the existence of God and His holy attributes, of the true nature of vice and virtue, of conscience and sin, of the spiritual and the temporal, of the proper purposes of life, of punishment and reward in an immortal life. We believe that Christianity is better than paganism; also that Christianity is something simple, positive, historical, that can and ought to be taught from the cradle to the grave, good for all conditions, for both sexes, and for every situation in life this side of the common grave. Believing this, we have shaped our conduct accordingly, and trust to God for the issue. In such matters it imports more to be right in principle than to be successful. Our secondary system of education has gone on from the founding of the Republic. Colleges for boys and academies for girls have risen up in every State and Territory, have been supported by the faithful people, and are doing an incalculable good. As our means increase and other advantages offer, we hope to improve them; Catholicism is no stagnant pool, but a field for every good private initiative that respects right and truth. In the Catholic University of America, founded in the last decade of the century by Pope Leo XIII. and the Catholic hierarchy, after due and lengthy deliberation, and made possible by the magnificent generosity of a Catholic woman, we have centred our hopes of a system of higher education that shall embody the best traditions of our ancient Church and the approved gains of our own times. American Catholics have not disposed in the past of great wealth, inherited or earned; hence all these works mean an incredible devotion and intensity of good will and sustained sacrifices. Wherever the Catholic Church has been strong and successful, schools of every kind flourish. I need only recall the fact that the idea, the constitution, the functions, the influences of a university were unknown in the world until she created the type in the Middle Ages, and gave over to mankind a new factor in civil and religious life—the power of organized learning.
THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT
Through the whole century one line of thought and action has been gradually disengaging itself from all others and dominating them. That is the social movement, or the tendency towards a more evenly just and natural conception of all the relations that arise from the common dwelling of mankind in organized society. It has long taken the form of institutions and plans for the betterment of the conditions of the people, of woman, of all who suffer or think they suffer from the actual organization of society. If there is something Utopian in certain plans or hopes, there is too much that is justifiable at the root of other attempts to reorganize our social conditions. Not to speak of the undesirable inheritances of the past, the new conditions created for the common man by the spread of industrialism and commercialism have often been painful in the extreme, and have aroused both violent protests and deep sympathy. By the help of God we have abolished the reproach of slavery in every civilized land, but we hear from the laboring multitudes a vague cry that they are already in the throes of a return to that accursed institution.
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. The trials of Catholicism have come more often from the luxury and the sin of those in high places than from the disaffection of its great masses. As this movement has gathered force, and passed from theories into the domain of action, the Catholic Church, through her head, has followed it with attention and respect. The whole pontificate of Leo XIII. is remarkable for acts and documents which have passed into the history of social endeavor in the nineteenth century. His personal charities, large and enlightened, are as nothing in comparison with the far-reaching acts like the refusal to condemn the association of the Knights of Labor. His encyclical on the Condition of Workingmen recalls the only possible lines of a final concord between labor and capital—the spirit and teachings of Jesus Christ, the best Friend our common humanity ever had. In the same way, his latest encyclical on Jesus Christ, with which the religious history of the century closes, emphasizes the true basis for the restoration of peace and harmony and justice between the poor and the rich, between the producers of capital and the capital that stimulates and regulates production. We may be confident that the papacy of the future will not show less enlightenment and sympathy in its attempts to solve these delicate and grave problems with the least injustice and the greatest charity.
LIGHTS AND SHADOWS
It would be idle to deny or to palliate the many shadows that fall across the history of Catholicism in the century that has elapsed. I scarcely need refer to the weaknesses and errors of her individual children: such acts she repudiates, and when she can chastises remedially. But the Church has not recovered that vast inherited moral power over the public life which it enjoyed before the French Revolution. In many ways the consequences of atheism, materialism, and even of deism, have been deduced into manners and institutions, to the detriment of the ancient Christian morality. The sterner Christian virtue of previous centuries, founded on the Christian revelation, has been forced out of the public life of whole peoples. Expediency, opportunism, moral cowardice have often triumphed over the plain right and the fair truth. The principle has been established that God is on the side of the great battalions, is ever with the strong men of blood and iron. Ancient and venerable sovereignties have been hypocritically dispossessed. Small nationalities have been erased from the world’s political map, and the history of the near past almost justifies the rumors of impending steps in the same direction. With the increase of greatness in states comes an increase of warlike perils, not only from commercial rivalry, but from that root of ambition and domination which grows in every heart, unless checked and subdued in time, and which in the past has been too often the source of violent injustice on the greatest scale.
These deeds and principles we believe to be a necessary result of naturalism, of the exclusion of the supernatural and revealed elements of Christianity from our public life, and not only these, but others of a graver character, that must one day follow from their logical and unchecked evolution. Divorce, a cause of ruin in every land, grows with rapidity in many civilized nations, so much so that not only Catholicism, its inveterate enemy, is shocked, but Christian men of every persuasion believe that some public and authoritative steps ought to be taken to prevent the pollution of the family life, that fixed and natural source of public morality. Religion has been officially thrust out of the systems of education, in every grade, and the young mind taught that it is quite a private and unimportant thing. Thus, under the plea of indifference, many States have practically made themselves the champions of that agnosticism which is the arch-enemy not only of religion, but also of patriotism from time immemorial connected with religion. The average man soon ceases to make great sacrifices, above all to die for the public good, when he is satisfied that there is no other life, or that it is not worth while living for the uncertainties of approval and reward by an eternal God, who is just and true and holy.
REASONS FOR ENCOURAGEMENT
On the other hand, the Catholic man or woman knows that there are great spiritual forces at work in the world, however unhappily its public life may be developing from the view-point of Christian morality. There are innumerable lives guided by the principles of Christian virtue, some of them even culminating in the highest sanctity. Though not all such are known to men, yet not a few become public examples and incitements to virtue. Even outside of the Catholic faith there are not a few who regulate their lives by the natural virtues and also by inherited Christian virtues that work sometimes unconsciously, but whose practice can only be pleasing to our common Father. Sweet Charity is yet a queen in Christian lands; her services and utility are too great to permit her dethronement. Great misfortunes of any kind still touch the hearts of men that are Christian yet when their minds have become clouded by indifference to, or dislike of, the supernatural verities. Luxury and wealth, greater perhaps than the world has yet seen, are still conscious of duties to the common weal. Educational institutions of every character and philanthropical enterprises of every variety have flourished on the means thus provided. But from our point of view it is better that all such phenomena, to be lasting, should have their root and origin in Christian purposes and belief. It is yet true, as it was of old on the hill-sides of Judæa: “Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it. Except the Lord keepeth the city, he watcheth in vain that keepeth it.” (Psalm 126.)
THE FUTURE OF CATHOLICISM
We entertain no doubt that the organization which has weathered the storms and stress of so many centuries will continue to do so in the future. The Catholic Church has the promises of her Divine Founder that the gates of hell shall not prevail against her. How could she doubt of her future? It does not seem likely that any vicissitudes can arise which have not their counterpart or analogy in the past, so old is she on this earth, and so many are the forms of government and the kinds of human culture with which she has lived. We are confident that she will be equal to all the emergencies of the future, for while the Church is always identical with and present to herself in a conscious way, her children and her agents may grow in experience and wisdom, as they undoubtedly do, and may bring both of these factors to bear upon the future problems of our common humanity. Of one thing we may feel certain: she will never cease to desire and to work for that efficacious unity of all Christendom, which is the permanent wish of its Holy Founder, and for which her bishops and priests have never ceased to pray in those opening words of the Roman Canon of the Mass that we repeat daily: “Therefore, O Most Clement Father, we suppliantly pray to Thee through Jesus Christ Our Lord... especially for Thy Holy Catholic Church, which mayst Thou vouchsafe to pacify, keep, unite, and govern throughout the world.”
JAMES, CARD. GIBBONS.
PROTESTANTISM
The motives which have acted upon religion in the nineteenth century, either by way of directly enhancing its power or by restricting its influence, are these: (1) Humanitarianism; (2) The Historical Spirit; (3) Science; (4) Nationalism. Although the course of religious history has varied somewhat in different countries as well as in the different Churches, yet it is possible to form an approximate picture of the resultant of these forces which will reveal the progress of the Kingdom of God in the world.
I
The first of these motives—humanitarianism—has powerfully influenced the Christian world by asserting the rights of man, liberty, equality and the spirit of fraternity, the sense of human brotherhood. The germs of the humanitarian movement may be traced in the eighteenth century, as in the teaching of Lessing and Herder and Rousseau; in religious movements like the Great Awakening in the United States, the revival in England under Wesley and Whitefield, in tentative efforts for the abolition of slavery (Hopkins and Clarkson), and prison reform (John Howard). But the nineteenth century has been distinguished above all the other Christian centuries in the results achieved by the sentiment of humanity. It has led to the abolition of slavery under English rule, in the United States, and in Russia; to many reform movements of every kind and degree, wherever there existed actual or latent tyranny, which robbed humanity of its inherent privileges.
The humanitarian sentiment is Christian in its origin, derived primarily from the conviction of the incarnation of God in Christ. Christ appears in history as the leader of humanity in the struggle for freedom. Slowly but surely ever since His advent, the world of man has been moving forward to the attainment of the ideal of humanity revealed in Him. “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. And if the Son of God shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” The progress towards freedom inspired by Him who taught the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of men has been accomplished in the face of great hinderances and long reverses, overcoming obstacles which would have been insuperable without Christian faith. In the nineteenth century the movement towards human freedom seems almost to have reached its culmination. Within the sphere of religion the progress is most manifest in the spread of Christian missions, which stand out in any review of the century as one of its most extraordinary achievements. It might be justly designated as a missionary age. So intense and persistent has been its devotion to the gospel of Christ as essential for man that when the century closed it might be truly said that the round world had been girdled with Christian missions, whose results are more significant for civilization, as well as for religion, than any statistics can reveal. The missionary has been the pioneer, it is becoming increasingly evident, of momentous changes yet to appear.
The sentiment of humanity has operated as a motive in the study of human history, giving to historical inquiry a new interest and impetus. No age has been so fruitful in the results of historical research, with conclusions of vital importance for every department of life, but chiefly this, that an independent place has been vindicated for humanity, as having a life of its own distinct from and above the natural order of the physical world. The study of man as he appears in history has tended to strengthen faith in the essential truths of religion, opening up as it has done the deeper knowledge of the nature of man to which the religion of Christ appeals; for the modern method of studying history, as compared with earlier methods, consists in seeking for those inward subjective moods of the human soul which lie beneath creeds or institutions, and not solely in the accurate description of the objective fact. The facts of human life call for interpretation, and for this the historian must search. Thus has been born what is almost a new department of inquiry—the philosophy of history (Hegel and many others). Differ as do these attempts at a philosophy of history, they yet possess one ruling idea—the conviction of a development in the life of humanity when viewed as a whole. The idea of development controlled the higher intellectual life of the first half of the century. It was applied with important results to the study of ecclesiastical history, by Schleiermacher, Neander, Gieseler, Baur, Rothe, Bunsen, and many others, by the Roman Catholic Möhler, in his _Symbolik_, and by John Henry Newman, in however one-sided and imperfect manner. The doctrine of development found its classic formula in the lines of Tennyson:
“Yet, I doubt not through the ages One increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widened With the process of the suns.”
The influence of the doctrine of development has been felt in the study of Scripture, leading to a recognition of progressiveness in the divine revelation, whose record has been preserved in the Old and New Testaments (Mozley, _Ruling Ideas in the Early Ages_). By means of this truth have been overcome, till they now seem unworthy, the objections to the Old Testament on the ground that it gave sanction to cruelty, deceit, or an imperfect morality. But the inference has also followed that the revelation of God to humanity must be searched for in the sacred records, and even by the light of close critical scrutiny, if the divine utterance is to be distinguished from crude misapprehensions or misapplications. Forms of literary expression, current usages, the historical environment of the time—for these allowance must be made as their influence is recognized. The science of biblical criticism has gained from the study of general history a larger knowledge of the nature of man, which, in turn, has made the study of the Bible more profound and thorough, because more real and human than were the biblical studies of the eighteenth century. The primary question which it has been found necessary to ask in regard to any doctrine or institution is not whether it is true—for the canons of truth may vary with the relative position of the inquirer; but, rather, what does it mean? When the meaning of the record is seen, the question of its truth has answered itself.
The effect of these studies, even of what is called the “higher criticism,” has not lessened the authority of the Bible or changed the character of Christianity as “a religion of the book”; but their tendency has been to vindicate the unique and essential place of the Bible in literature as containing the veritable record of a divine revelation. Some things, indeed, have been changed: the order in which the books of the Bible were written is not the order in which they stand; some of them are of composite authorship, whose various parts were written at different times; the traditional chronology, known as Ussher’s (1656), has been abandoned, nor is there anything in the Bible which places it in opposition to the teachings of geology relative to the length of time during which man has occupied the earth; the historical order of priest and prophet has been reversed, so that the voice of prophecy comes before the decline into ritual (Wellhausen and others). Popular misapprehensions tend to vanish in the light of a true insight and interpretation, such as that the first chapter of Genesis was intended to be an infallible record of the divine order in the creation of the world. That a similar account of the creation is found in Babylonian literature only shows that the Bible writer was illustrating by the best scientific knowledge of the time the vastly higher spiritual truth with which the Bible opens, that the creation is the work of God, thus leading man to the worship of God and away from the lower worships of sun and moon and all the hosts of Heaven.
The mechanical conceptions as to the mode of inspiration and revelation tend to give way before a larger and truer conception of the process by which the revelation is made—that God speaks to man actually and authoritatively through the experience of the events of life. Thus revelation becomes a living process, and all later history may become a commentary on sacred history, renewing and confirming the primal utterance of God to the soul of man. Much, it is true, yet remains to be done in bridging the gulf between the learned and scientific interpretation of the sacred record and the popular apprehension, which, formed in the uncritical moments of youth, often persists to mature years and constitutes a source of confusion and weakness. A similar situation was seen in the Middle Ages in the wide breach which existed between the scholastic theologians and the popular mind.
A new department has been added to religious inquiry in Comparative Religion, which aims at an impartial investigation and free from prejudice, and is also moved by the sentiment of a common humanity to respect all utterances of religious feeling in the soul of man. How widely the nineteenth century has advanced in this respect is seen by recalling a statement of Dr. Johnson: “There are two objects of curiosity—the Christian world and the Mohammedan world. All the rest may be considered as barbarous.” One of the most representative monuments of religious scholarship in the last century is Professor Max Müller’s _Sacred Books of the East_. Some inquirers in this unfamiliar department have worked under the impression that these ancient religions were equal in value to the Christian revelation; others even have thought them to be in some respects superior. And, in general, the first effect of the discovery that there was truth in other religions had a tendency to weaken the claim of Christianity to be the absolute religion. But as the results of the study have been placed in their normal perspective, it becomes evident that they only confirm the words of St. Paul, that God has at no time left Himself without witnesses in the world. Revelation also is seen to have been a universal process; and profound spiritual motives are to be discerned beneath the diverse manifestations of the religious instincts. Yet, on the whole, the preponderating judgment leads to the conclusion that Christianity contains the larger, even the absolute, truth; that while it confirms some features in these religions as true, it condemns others as false; that Christianity also has for one of its essential characteristics an assimilative power, which not only enables, but forces, it to appropriate as its own any aspects of truth contained in other religions, which have not hitherto been illustrated in the history of the Christian Church. Nor is the familiar test applied to religions wholly indefensible which judges them by their historical fruits or associations. In accordance with this test, Confucianism is represented by China, Hinduism by India, Buddhism by Ceylon and Siam, Mohammedanism by Turkey, Christianity by Europe and America.