manity is God, or God is humanity, no matter which. For us there is no God beyond humanity. The dark background of being on which man is traced by an invisible pencil is to us as if it were not, for, as Hegel teaches, it arrives at self-consciousness only in man. These chiefs must assuredly be great men, or how else could they beget such huge absurdities or utter such big blasphemies? But all this shows that the age is humanitarian; that it takes literally the maxim, Vox populi, vox Dei; and erects its temples and its altars to human nature. Very religious !

Assuming that humanity is divine, inspired, God incarnate, and that her will is always supreme, M. Quinet arraigns the Church for not countenancing what he calls "the party of the Future." There is now, he contends, throughout all Christendom, an obvious tendency to what are called social ameliorations. This tendency is the new life, the spirit of the age. Everywhere we see a party opposed to the existing social order, warring against authority, zealous for liberty, and calling aloud for a redress of grievances. This party is assumed to represent humanity. Its voice is her voice; its authority is her authority; and through it she speaks out from her own mighty heart for REFORM, for PROGRESS, for LIBERTY, for the elevation of her oppressed and down-trodden children. Whoso does not rally under the banners of this party is wedded to the dead past, is a friend of abuses, a minion of despotism, an enemy to light, to science, to truth, to freedom, to the onward march of the masses to the fulfilment of the glorious destiny of humanity.

The party of the future, it is assumed, is the Christian party. Did not Jesus Christ come to be the father of a new age, to introduce a new order, which in its progress and development was to swallow up the old world, whether Jewish or Pagan? Did he not promise his followers a good they had not as yet attained to, and bid them aspire to a glory hereafter to be revealed? What, then, was he but a reformer, an innovator, one who sought to destroy the order he found existing, and, in spite of its opposition, to introduce a new and more advanced order? And what is it to be a Christian but to imitate Christ, to seek to do as he did, and like him to be reformers, innovators, revolutionists, choosing rather to die on the cross than to submit to the established order of things? In order to be his disciples, it is not incumbent on us to believe what he taught and to do what he commanded, as professed Christians

have generally held, but to do for our age what he did for his. The Christian party was the movement party, the progressive party, and he we shudder to write it was the leading infidel of his age and country. Now the Church can be true to him only on condition of making common cause with the movement party of our times, the party that resists authority and clamors for change and innovation under the specious guise of social amelioration. But the Church does not make common cause with this party; she even sides with its enemies, and exerts herself to sustain existing institutions, and to uphold legal authority. Then she is opposed to reform, to progress, to liberty; at war with the sacred instincts of humanity, with the Welt- Geist, or spirit of the age, and therefore with Christ himself. Then the spirit of Christ commands us to resist the Church, to overturn its authority, and free ourselves from its thraldom.

We assure our Christian readers that we are not caricaturing the views of the movement party. All we say its chiefs have said in sober earnest, and the spirit which says it is common to all its members, whether calling themselves Protestants or Catholics; for many who should be Catholics are of the party. Let the Church denounce Young Ireland, and Young Ireland - not old Ireland, thank God is prepared to denounce the Church. One of our papers castigates, without mercy, the Dublin Review for its able exposition of the madness of Young Italy in attempting to revolutionize the Italian States, and thus, unintentionally, we presume, joins hands with the Christian Alliance. In France and Spain there is, as well as in Germany and America, the same spirit. The movement party is placed above religion, and made the criterion by which to determine the Christianity of the Church. The Church is allowed to be Christian only in proportion as she is believed to be on the side of those who are seeking to renew the horrors of the French Revolution, under pretence of social amelioration.

Yet this same party, with a consistency peculiarly its own, denounces the Church, whenever it attempts to emancipate itself from dependence on the civil powers. A great question arises in France; the Church takes the side of liberty against the government, and M. Quinet and his whole pack are loose upon her. In this country, the standing objection to the Catholic Church is, in substance, that she holds herself independent of the civil authority; just as if she could aid the cause of freedom, when subjected to the civil tyrant!

We cannot, in the brief space now at our command, undertake to clear up all the questions which are involved in these views. That the Church does not make common cause in all cases with the movement party we very cheerfully admit. She holds herself answerable to God for her conduct, not to the self-styled representatives of humanity. She has not received her commission from humanity, but from humanity's Maker and sovereign Lord. It is for humanity to obey her, not for her to obey humanity. Her teachings, not the instincts or tendencies of human nature, are the law, the measure of right and wrong, of good and evil. Your big words, your appeals to the mighty heart of humanity, to the new life, the spirit of the age, all your fine phrases about liberty, progress, social amelioration, and all that, are of no avail. Where the Church condemns you, you are wrong, not she.

Yet it is false to say that the Church ever opposes light, science, liberty, or social progress. Does she oppose liberty in Poland, where she is the unhappy Pole's only protector? Did she oppose it in Belgium? Does she oppose it in France, where she stands firm against the government for the liberty guarantied by the charter? Does she oppose it in Ireland, where her whole influence is on the side of social amelioration? She opposes not liberty, but license. She unquestionably does oppose the modern revolutionary spirit; but when she finds men, like O'Connell, who seek liberty and social amelioration only by peaceful and legal means, she does not oppose them, but blesses them, and makes their cause sacred. As for light, science, and all that, it does not become you to speak. She undoubtedly does not accept all your theories, all your mad speculations and airy dreams; but you have no light she rejects, have made no discovery in science she does not accept. But you talk of your light, as if you were the lights of the age, of science, as if you had amassed an amount too vast to be compressed within the narrow inclosure of the Church. Quite a mistake, Gentlemen. If you set aside your guesses, your dreams, your mere theories, your unsupported speculations, and reserve only what you have really established, what may be said to be demonstrated, you have nothing not known to the Church long ages before you were born. The Church accepts all your light, and can find room to stow away all your truth; but she has no fondness for your darkness, and no space for your error and falsehood. With your doctrines and speculations she is quite familliar, for

they are nothing but old errors and heresies, which she discarded and condemned many ages ago, and which the real movement party has long since outgrown. You are no creators, no inventors. With all your genius, you cannot even invent a new blasphemy. You remind us of the little girl who stood watching the western sky as the sun went down. The sun went down, the twilight came; and, as the darkness deepened, the evening star became visible. "Father, father, see there, God has made a star!" So when you see here and there a feeble star, which the darkness gathering over your mental heavens makes visible, you fancy, in an ecstasy of delight, that it is a new creation, or at least a new discovery. Him who is enamoured of his own intellectual progress we may always safely set down as one who has yet to learn that he is - a fool. The Church does not oppose progress, but she may, we own, oppose your doctrine of progress; for she has never yet seen a man lift himself up by his own waistbands, or motion without something fixed and immovable to communicate it. Your doctrine of progress assumes that man without going out of himself can make himself more than he is, the imperfect is able to perfect itself, the possible to make itself real, nothing to make itself something, and that there can be motion without rest. Really, Gentlemen, you are profound philosophers. You can move the world, and without the where to stand deemed so indispensable by old Archimedes! It is no wonder that you regard the Church as behind the age.

Progress there may be, but not without a power foreign to the subject of progress. The error of the movement party is not in demanding progress, but in demanding it of man alone, and where it is suicidal to demand it. The condition of progress is fixed, permanent, and immovable religious and political institutions. The movement party overlook this fact, and demand progress in institutions themselves. They seek to set the institutions themselves afloat, and thus loosen every thing; which superinduces a state in which all progress is impossible. The grand error is here. The party kills, as in the fable, the goose that lays the golden egg, in the hope of getting more than one egg a day, and thus cuts off the source of golden eggs altogether. It is only this madness which wars upon the established order, and seeks to destroy, for the sake of progress, the condition of all progress, that the Church opposes.

But it may be asked, if institutions are not or may not be progressive. In themselves considered, no. Religious insti

tutions may be improved or perfected miraculously by the supernatural providence of God, or without a miracle, by transplanting the institutions of one country to those of another, by missions, colonization, or conquest; and civil institutions also by colonization, conquest, or the aid of religious institutions already established and in their vigor; but not otherwise. This is philosophically demonstrable, and historically verifiable. There is no such thing as self-perfecting institutions. Without one, or another, or all of the efficient causes we have mentioned, improvement in religious or civil institutions is absolutely impossible; for the simple reason, that the imperfect can never without the aid of a foreign power become perfect, nothing can make itself more than it is; or, as we say, there is no motion without rest, no man can lift himself up by his own waistbands.

The

If we turn to history, we shall find that institutions, though they may decline, are never progressive. There is no instance on record of a spontaneous civilization, no instance of a savage people emerging of itself from the savage state. The earliest period of all civil and political institutions is their purest and best period. The history of all states is a history of decline, corruption, deterioration of their institutions. struggle of nations is always for lost rights, lost privileges. Magna Charta is but an attempt to stay the progress of corruption, and to preserve a portion of what had been enjoyed from time immemorial. The earliest of the pyramids is the most perfect as a work of art. The Cloaca Maxima of Rome was built before the epoch of authentic history. The traditions of every people point to a state of society in the past superior to that which is at present enjoyed. The wisest and most salutary laws of all modern nations, save such as are derived from Christianity, have their origin in the night of ages, have existed and been in force from time immemorial, for a time so long that "the memory of man runneth not to the contrary." Never expect from institutions a worth or adaptedness they do not possess in their origin.

The historian of modern society can trace a progress of civilization effected by Christianity, but no progress in institutions, properly so called. Improvements in administration may have been introduced, though even this, if taken absolutely, may be questioned; but in all cases where change, innovation, has struck at fundamental institutions, it has been a corruption, the sign of decay, and the precursor, if not the cause, of evil.