The Catholic World, Vol. 10, October, 1869 to March, 1870Various
Religion
The Catholic World, Vol. 10, October, 1869 to March, 1870
Various
Catholic Church -- Periodicals
But we should be ourselves the fool and madman if we attempted to
reason with them. They discard logic, reject reason, and count the
understanding as one of the poorest of our faculties; as mean,
narrow, personal. Reason and understanding are personal; and all
truth, all knowledge, all wisdom, all that is real is impersonal. Is
not the impersonality of God, that is, of nature, a primary article
of their creed? How, then, reason with them or expect them to listen
to the voice of reason? Reason is too strait for them, and they have
outgrown it, as they have outgrown the church! They do not even
pretend to be logically consistent with themselves. No one holds
himself bound by his own utterances, any more than he does by the
utterances of another. They are free religionists, and scorn to be
bound even by the truth.
But suppose they wish to retain men and women--or women and men, for
with them woman is the superior--as persons, how do they expect by
restricting, as they do, their knowledge to this life, and making
their happiness consist in the goods of this world alone, to effect
their individual amelioration? Socialism secures always its own
defeat. The happiness of this life is attainable only by living
for another. Restricted to this life and this world, man has play
for only his animal instincts, propensities, and powers. There is
no object on which his higher or peculiarly human affections and
faculties can be exerted, and his moral, religious, rational nature
must stagnate and rot, or render him unspeakably miserable by his
hungering and thirsting after a spiritual good which he has not, and
which is nowhere to be had. The happiness of this life comes from
living for a supernatural end, the true end of man, in obedience
to the law it prescribes. When we make this life or this world our
end, or assume, with Mr. Emerson, that we have it within, in our own
impersonal nature, we deny the very condition of either individual or
social happiness, take falsehood for truth; and no good ever does or
can come from falsehood.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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