The ecclesiastical writers of the first ages furnish a solid foundation for all the future labours of Christian science; but their science does not comprehend all the branches of human knowledge. In the middle age, undoubtedly, this foundation of a Christian science, laid down by the early fathers, was slowly prosecuted and in detail; but on the whole, many hurtful influences of the time had reduced science and speculation to a very low ebb, when suddenly in the fifteenth century all the literary treasures of ancient Greece, and all the new discoveries in geography and physics, were offered to philosophy. Scarcely had philosophy begun to examine these mighty stores of ancient and modern science, in order to give them a Christian form, and to appropriate them to the use of religion and modern society, when the world again broke out into disputes; and this noble beginning of a Christian philosophy was interrupted, and has since remained an unfinished fragment for a later and a happier period. Such then is the two-fold problem of a real and complete regeneration which our age is called upon to solve;--on one hand, the further extension of Christian government, and of Catholic principles of legislation, in opposition to the Revolutionary spirit of the age, and to the anti-Christian principle of government hitherto so exclusively prevalent; and on the other hand the establishment of a Christian philosophy, or Catholic science. As I before characterized the political spirit of the eighteenth century by the term--Protestantism of state (taking that word in a purely philosophic sense, and not as a religious designation)--a system which found its one main support in an old Catholic Empire;[25] and as I characterized the intellectual spirit of the same age by the term Protestantism of science;--a science which made the greatest progress and exerted the widest influence in another[26] great Catholic country; systems in which nothing irreligious was originally intended, but which became so by their too exclusive or negative bearing: so I may here permit myself to say, in like manner, that the destiny of this age--the peculiar want of the nineteenth century, is the establishment of those Catholic principles of government, and the general construction of a Catholic system of science. This expression is used in a mere scientific sense, and refers to all that is positively and completely religious in thought and feeling. In the certain conviction that this cannot be misunderstood in an exclusive or polemical sense, I will expressly add that this foundation of Catholic legislation for the future political existence of Europe may be laid by one, or more than one, non-catholic power; and that I even cherish the hope, that it is our own Germany, one half whereof is Protestant, which more than any other country is destined to complete the fabric of Catholic science, and of a true Christian philosophy in all the departments of human knowledge.