you had anything to drink, Biddy?" asked the priest, who knew his penitent. Biddy owned to a little drop of whisky. " "Well, Biddy," said the prudent divine, "to-morrow take two little drops, and sure you'll see St. Paul as well."

DAMON. Good. That ecclesiastic evidently possessed the gift of discerning of spirits.

PYTHIAS. At all events, a promising "apparition" was nipped in the bud. But you will hardly deny that in many Catholic countries the popular worship is often nothing but coarse idolatry.

DAMON. I most certainly do deny it. I am sure that when most corrupt it is always more than coarse idolatry; nay, that in the proper sense of the word there is no idolatry at all in it. No Catholic, however ill-instructed, would dream of offering the supreme worship of the altar to any object but God.

PYTHIAS. But the superstitions of Catholic countries, my dear friend, "gross as a mountain, open, palpable!"

DAMON. Barth, in his admirable book on the Religions of India, speaking of the impure beliefs of certain Hindoo sects, says: "It would be to display great ignorance of the immense resources of the religious sentiment to presume that the effect of them must have been necessarily and universally demoralising"; and he adds very justly: "The common people have a certain safeguard in the very grossness of their superstition, and among the

CHAP. IV.] LITERALLY FALSE, IDEALLY TRUE. 285

higher ranks there are many souls that are at once. mystically inclined and pure-hearted, who know how to extract the honey of pure love from a strange mixture of obscenities." This applies more strongly to the superstitions found in Catholic countries, superstitions which, at the worst, are only childish or grotesque, the ideal cast by the popular fancy into the form in which the simple can receive it. We must always remember that a thing may be literally false and ideally true. A legend may be doubtful: the faith and devotion which it excites in religious but uncritical minds are very real. St. Augustine well says he is speaking of textmongering, but the same principle applies" isto humillimo genere verborum, tanquam materno sinu, eorum gestatur infirmitas, salubriter ædificatur fides."

PYTHIAS. Of course you do not defend pious frauds?

may

DAMON. By no means. I am talking of popular beliefs about the supernatural which we find existing, which we do not know to be true, and shrewdly suspect to be false, and which you call superstition. Well, I say, with Cardinal Newman, that "taking human nature as it is,"I do not deal in individua vaga,-"superstition is the sure companion of faith, when vivid and earnest," and that we may surely concede a little superstition, as not the worst of evils, if it be the price of making sure of faith."

66

PYTHIAS. So that, in fact, you have two religions in the Catholic Church: philosophy, science, transcendentalism for the educated; winking Virgins and mythology for the ignorant.

DAMON. NO. The message of the Church is one and the same to all, but naturally it is differently apprehended by different minds. And the office of the Church is, like that of the Apostle,-to become all things to all men that she may save all. There are in the Catholic Church, as St. Augustine speaks, spiritales and carnales, those who possess what he calls the serene intelligence of truth, and those the vast majority-who are illuminated by the simple faith of little ones. But the most feeble and confused intellectual intelligence is consistent with the highest sanctity. Things hidden from the wise and prudent are often revealed unto babes./ It was a fine saying of one of the early lights of the Franciscan order: "A poor ignorant old woman who loves Jesus may be greater than Brother Bonaventura." The substance of the message of the Catholic Church is the supremacy of goodness. Not what a man knows but what he loves is the test, according to the great maxim of St. Augustine: "Boni aut mali mores sunt boni aut mali amores." Pardon my quoting St. Augustine so much. But he, more than any one else, has been my teacher for years past, completing and perfecting what Plato began.

PYTHIAS. "Quidquid dicitur in Platone vivit in

CHAP. IV.] SCIENCE WITHOUT EPITHETS.

287.

Augustino "-is not that the dictum? I confess St. Augustine is but a name to me. What you say will lead me to make him something more. But let us return to our point. You maintain that the Catholic Church does not proscribe, condemn, or reject any truth of any kind which the modern mind has brought to light?

DAMON. To do so would be to stultify herself as the representative of the God of Truth. "Truth of what kind soever is by no kind of truth gainsaid." I do not know who has spoken upon this matter better, or more loyally and honestly (pace M. Renan), than that illustrious savant and devout Catholic, the late François Lenormant, in words which I am glad to retain in my memory:-"Je suis un Chrétien et maintenant que ma croyance peut être un titre à l'outrage, je tiens plus que jamais à la proclamer hautement. En même temps je suis un savant, et comme tel je ne connais pas une science Chrétienne et une science libre-penseuse: je n'admet qu'une seule science qui n'a pas besoin d'autre épithète que son nom même, qui laisse de coté, comme étrangères à son domaine, les questions théologiques, et dont tous chercheurs de bonne foi sont au même titre les serviteurs, quelques soient leurs convictions religieuses." 1

PYTHIAS. There is a ring of honesty about that which presents a curious contrast to what we read

1 Les Origines de l'Histoire d'après la Bible, par François Lenormant, Pref. p. 9.

in

many of your Catholic journals. I remember Sainte-Beuve complaining, and as I thought with reason, of M. Louis Veuillot's complete disregard of truth in respect of him: "son absence complète de verité à mon égard." It seems to me that whether a thing is true, is not by any means the first consideration with your controversialists. They would do well to learn and inwardly digest the Hindu proverb: "A fact is not altered by a hundred texts."

DAMON. I admit that there are many Catholic writers in France and elsewhere, earnest and forcible writers, who display a lamentable unwillingness to look facts in the face; who seem to be penetrated with the conviction that Catholicity is a tottering structure which a too bold word will overthrow. The violence of these singular defenders of the faith is only equalled by their pusillanimity. But remember that Catholicity has come into this nineteenth century out of the unspeakable degradation of the eighteenth, the most melancholy century, to me, in the annals of the Church. What a picture it offers! Religion sunk into formalism; the devout few scandalized at liberty and afraid of philosophy; the political and metaphysical speculations of the Middle Ages, so frank and so hardy, cast aside. And no wonder: for the doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas, whether on the authority of reason or on popular rights, was entirely out of harmony with the spirit which