Nobody in his senses denies that man is progressive, or that modern society has made marvellous progress in the material order, in the application of science to the productive arts. I am no _laudator temporis acti_; I understand and appreciate the advantages of the present, and do not doubt that steam navigation railroads, and lightning telegraphs, which bid defiance to the winds and waves, and as it were annihilate space and time, will one day be made to subserve higher than mere material interests; but I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that in many and very important respects, the modern world has deteriorated instead of improving, and been more successful in losing than in gaining. The modern nations commonly regarded, at least by themselves, as the more advanced nations, have fallen in moral and religious thought below the ancient Greeks and Romans. They may have more sound dogmas, but they have less conception of principles, of the invisible or spiritual order, excepting always the followers of Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus, whose absurd materialism is revived with hardly any disguise by the most approved thinkers of our own age. The Gentiles generally held catholic principles, but misapprehended and misapplied them, and thus fell into gross idolatry and degrading and besotting superstition; but the moderns while retaining many Catholic dogmas have lost the meaning of the word principle. The Catholic can detect, no doubt, phases of truth in all the doctrines of those outside the church, but the Christianity they profess has no universal, immutable, and imperishable principle, and degenerates in practice into a blind and fierce fanaticism, a watery sentimentality, a baseless humanitarianism, or a collection of unrelated and unmeaning dogmas, which are retained only because they are never examined, and which can impart no light to the understanding, infuse no life into the hearty and impose no restraint on the appetites and passions. {53}