ism? As long as the fact is so what do we gain by refusing to own it, and to give it its proper explanation ? Suppose the explanation does require us to recognize faults. in ourselves, to acknowledge we have suffered ourselves to be too much influenced by the opinions and policy of the Catholics of Europe, and have not appealed, as often as we should have done, from the opinions and conduct of our European brethren to the requirements of the Church and the great principles of natural right or justice recognized by her, and considered what is most befitting us as citizens of a free but non-Catholic republic? Shall we, therefore, refuse to place ourselves right before the American public at large, or accuse as a traitor to our cause the Catholic publicist who labors honestly and zealously to do it?

It may be said, that the Catholic publicist may avoid all questions of this sort, and should do so, because he cannot treat them without stirring up strife where all should be peace and harmony. We know we are commanded to "follow after the things which make for peace," but we have never understood that we are commanded to seek peace at the cost of duty or principle. Our Lord is the Prince of peace, and yet he said, "Think not that I am. come to send peace on earth; yea, a sword rather." If the controversy between Catholics and non-Catholics were confined to the regions of theology and metaphysics, were chiefly a controversy concerning particular theological doctrines and religious practices, no Catholic publicist would or could be justified in broaching questions whereon Catholics differ among themselves. The questions which we have indicated would then have little or no importance, and it would be wrong on the part of any Catholic to discuss or even to broach them. But we have all along been laboring to prove, that these are the questions of the age, and that we cannot take part in the the day without taking part in them. able number of Catholics here and this, and this is precisely the great difficulty we have to encounter, and the cause of the hostility the living Catholic

living controversy of No doubt a considerelsewhere do not see

controversialist meets on the part of his own brethren. Certainly there is a large body of non-Catholics who are to be met where and in the way they were met by Bellarmine and Suarez, Bossuet and Fénelon, and we complain not that there are none amongst us who are ready and willing so to meet them. We do not want these neglected, and we applaud every new work that issues from our press, at home or abroad, adapted to their state of mind. But these are laggards, the old fogies of Protestantism, and do not represent the age, and works appropriate to them do not reach. the practical wants of the men who lead the age, determine its character, and give it its tone. These the advanced party of the non-Catholic world understand well that they cannot maintain the controversy on the old ground, or if confined to the sphere of theology and metaphysics, and have transferred it to the political and social field, where we are now required to meet it; and, therefore, we are obliged to take up questions in which Catholics are more or less divided among themselves, or not take part in the controversy demanded by the times. It is no choice of ours that we take up these practical living questions. We are forced to do it, if we would speak as a living man to the living men of the present day. It is not we who have placed the controversy on its present ground; we have only found and

met it there.

We do not say, that every publicist must engage in the discussion of these exciting questions, exciting, simply because living and practical, but we do contend, that the discussion of them is not to be sacrificed to the discussion of questions, which, for the age, are out of date. We say it is necessary that they should be grappled with, and he who grapples freely with them, let him do the best he can, the best that any man can, will seem to those who are unaware that the world has moved since the seventeenth century, imprudent, unnecessarily offensive, warped by prejudice, following his own eccentricities or idiosyncrasies, magnifying molehills into mountains, and, upon the whole, a very restless, uneasy, and unsafe man, who can never be

brought to see or acquiesce in the holy admonition: Quieta non movere. Now, what we maintain is, that the Catholic public must not hastily condemn the publicist who takes up these questions and discusses them with freedom, candor, and impartiality. If Catholics want living men, men up to the times, and able to strike the insurgent error the moment it raises its head above the waters, or to defend the Church against its real enemies at the moment, they must encourage him, liberally sustain him, for it is only on the condition of their doing so, that we can command and lead the intelligence of the age. If he says hard things, even cutting things, even if he errs, as he is sure to do, for he is human,-in judgment or in matters of fact, do not decry him as an enemy, as a traitor in the camp, a wolf in sheep's clothing, deprive him of all power of doing good, and break his heart. Vindicate the truth against him, wherever and whenever there is occasion, but do it with firmness and moderation, with the manners of gentlemen, and the charity of Christians. Above all, do not make a mountain of what may seem to those who take only little interest in the questions he treats, to be imprudent expressions, or an imprudent way of doing a thing which you admit it is lawful and right to do. Every man, who is a man, has a way of his own. The style, somebody says, is the man; deprive him of that, and he is no longer the same man. Besides, the man may be as good a judge as you, of what is true prudence, or its contrary, and you are sure to take away half of his courage and all his power to serve the cause of truth, if you are always charging him with imprudence, especially if you do it as his friend, by way of apology or

excuse.

PART. II.-1. The Philosophy of the Absolute. The Rambler. London, September, 1858.

2. Rosmini and Gioberti. The Rambler. London, September, 1859.

ONE of the objections to Gioberti's philosophical system is its novelty. We answer by a distinction: it is new in form but old in substance. It was not taught by the Pagan philosophers because it is based on the reality of creation, and creation was a mystery which the Pagan mind attempted in vain to solve. Plato makes the nearest approach to it of any ancient sage, and had he lived in Christian times, the Abbate Gioberti's work might have been forestalled by the Athenian. The connection between theology and philosophy has been so frequently dwelt on in the pages of the Review, as to make it sufficient for our purpose now simply to allude to it. When a man's theology is false the poison of error filters down to the lower substratum of philosophy, and when his philosophy is false he can escape heresy in theology only by inconsistency, by meekly sacrificing his logical principles on the altar of his faith. Man's final destiny, in the present order, is exclusively supernatural ; there is no natural beatific, no natural damnatific vision for him. Heaven with its supernatural rewards, or hell with its supernatural punishments, is to be his home for ever. God designs, in man's case, that nature and grace, philosophy and theology, should be in constant union. To sever that union is to sin. Hence we need expect to find true philosophy only amongst those who retained the primitive supernatural revelation, and those whose privilege it is to have superadded to it the teachings of Jesus Christ. The Synagogue and the Church are the guardians of philosophy as well as of religion. And it is amongst the ablest cham

pions of the Church that the Giobertian system has found its most able defenders. St. Augustine, St. Anselm, St. Bonaventura and Fénelon did not lay down, in so many words, that Ens creat existentias is the primum philosophicum; that the assertion of the synthetic judgment to the thinking subject, and its consequent apprehension by that subject, are the necessary conditions of all thought, but they teach what is tantamount to it. It is not our intention to make quotations from their writings; we wish to construct an argument from reason, not from authority. Those of our readers who desire to verify our assertion concerning the authors in question, can have their curiosity gratified by consulting St. Augustine's Soliloquies, passim, St. Bonaventura's Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, chap. 5, and the 1st part of Fénelon's book de l'Existence' de Dieu.

When the scholastic theologians of the middle ages systematized the teachings of the Church, moulded them into one scientific whole, and arrayed them in the garb of Aristotelian phraseology, they were not anathematized as innovators. Their doctrine was the doctrine of the Apostles, the doctrine of Christ, but their method was their own. Methods will change and must change. Truth is not to be kept as a fossil in a museum of antiques, but one and eternal as God himself; it is also as living and active as he, as elastic in its adaptation to times and places, as multiform in the modes of its manifestation to human intellects. Scholasticism with its phantasmata, its intelligible species, its thousand quaint yet profound distinctions, has had its day, and has done its work, and done it well. We should be badly off if the schoolmen had never lived or written. Ill would it fare with us, if, whilst the army of falsehood, provided with all the weapons of modern intellectual warfare is drawn up against us, we still had to do the work that the scholastics have done for us, still to find the arms which fortunately they have manufactured for us. to the armory of the middle ages, of St. selm, Alexander Hales, Dun Scotus, and and if we find their suits of mail too

We must go

Thomas, St. AnSt. Bonaventura, massive for our