of the special sciences have their principles in themselves, or do or can demonstrate the principles on which they depend, and from which they derive their scientific character. They all depend for their scientific character on a higher science, the science of sciences, which the church and the church alone teaches. The principles of ethics, and therefore of politics as a branch of ethics, all lie in the theological order, and without theology there is and can be no science of ethics or politics; and hence we see that both, with those who reject theology, are purely empirical, without any scientific basis. An atheist may be moral in his conduct, but if there were no God there could be no morality; so may an atheist be a geometrician, but if there were no God there could be no geometry. Deny God, and what becomes of lines that may be infinitely projected, or of space shading off into immensity, on which so much in the science of geometry depends? Nay, deny God, and what would become even of finite space? Yet without the conception of space, which is in truth only the power of God to externize his acts, geometry would be impossible. All the special sciences are secondary, and are really science only when carried up to their first principles and explained by them. What more absurd, then, than the attempt of scientists to prove by science there is no God, or to oppose science to the theology of the church, without which no science is possible? We need but look at the present state of men's minds to see how the world gets on without the church. Never were men more active or indefatigable in their researches: they send their piercing glances into all subjects, sacred and profane; they investigate the heavens and the earth, the present and the past, and leave no nook or corner of nature unexplored, and yet there is not a principle of ethics, politics, or science that is not denied or called in question. In the moral and political world nothing is fixed or settled, and moral and intellectual science, as well as statesmanship, disappears. Doubt and uncertainty hang over all questions, and the distinctions between right and wrong, just and unjust, as well as between good and evil, are obscured and well-nigh obliterated. The utmost confusion reigns in the whole world of thought, and "men," as a distinguished prelate said to us the other day, "are trying the experiment of governing the world without conscience." All this proves what we maintain, that they who deny the church, or reject her teaching, have no truth to oppose to her, no reason for their denial, and no principle on which they base their rejection of her authority. Their rejection of the church and her teaching is purely gratuitous, and therefore, if not sinful, is at least baseless.