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Show CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY ' (Correspondence Intwmountain Catliolic Washington, D. C, Jan. 25. The Feast of St. Paul the Apostle is ob-served ob-served as a holiday by the Faculty of Theology of the University. This year, the day was marked with great solem- nity in the Divinity chapel of Caldwell hall. Solemn High Mass was celebrated celebrat-ed at 9:30 o'clock by Right Rev. Mgr. D. Sbaretti, bishop-elect of Havana, assisted as-sisted by Rev. Victor F. Ducat of Detroit, De-troit, as deacon, and Rev. Eneas B. Goodwin of Chicago as sub-deacon,' Rev. T. P. O'Keefe of Santa Fe was master of ceremonies. The Right. Rev. Rector and the Very Rev. Vice Rector, i with the members of the Faculty , of Theology, were present in their acad- emic robes. The chapel was well filled with the professors and students of the affiliated colleges grouped about the university, and those . professors and students of the schools of philosophy and law who were not at the time engaged en-gaged in class work. After the gospel, Rev. Dr. Edmund T. Shanahan, professor pro-fessor Of dogma, delivered a magnificent magnifi-cent sermonv Space will not permit the giving of this beautiful discourse in full, but the following will help to give some idea of it: i "Ho.v can we compass in detail the multi-colored instances of his life? Saul of Tarsus, a citizen of no mean city, who sat at the feet of Gamaliel and learned the law and stored his mind with many technical phrases akin with the method of the academy and the porch; the young Pharisee wrho held the garments of those who stoned the Blessed Stephen, wThose eyes were blinded on the road to Damascus, only tf onpn nn n. l.irtrpr and frpor hnrlinn- who fell from his horse a destroyer, and rose from the ground an architect and upbuilder of that very church upon whose destructionvhe had set his heart; the ascetic, who retired into solitude the better to mature his plans before reappearing at Jerusalem; the enthusiastic enthusi-astic missionary, braving the dangers of sea and land on three great journeys jour-neys to break the bread of Christ's doctrine to the hungering; the prudent general, who garrisoned the cities he had conquered, by the bishops whom he installed in his wake and by the letters let-ters he sent back as fortifying safeguards, safe-guards, full of charity, it is true, and of forbearance, yet full also of that dogmatic and disciplinary., wisdom which is from above, which would not prove .an aid and spur to man's progress prog-ress in redemption if it , were not combative com-bative and upon which, in the . words of Paul, cursed be he, whether man or angel, who shall sit in judgment; the Roman citizen, who invoked the 'lex Porcia' as his birthright and fearlessly fearless-ly appealed to Caesar over the head cf Festus, and finally the old campaigner in his prison house at Rome, writing back for the cloak and manuscripts he had left at Troas, and compressing his whole life into the favorite simile of the soldier, which might well serve for his own everlasting epitaph: 'I have fought a good fight. I have finished my course. I have kept the faith. ' To discuss this general field of Paul's acr tivity in which so many have put their sickles would scarcely result in our. being rewarded with a sheaf. For not so much Saul of Tarsus, nor Paul of Torncilflm nnv Paul tha m i cc-i n w would we delineate today as patron of this faculty, -but rather Paul. of the church of the eternal first-born, the great spokesman of the supernatural and the theologian of the realm of grace. "The long deferred answers to the old questions: Whence? Whither? and wrhy? had come. God had sent his only Son to answer them and his own abiding abid-ing spirit to make us cry: Abba! Father! The Fatherhood of God,- the adopted sonship of men in Christ, the personal indwelling of the Holy Ghost in the tabernacular souls of the just, and the quickening hope of an everlasting everlast-ing heritage and a face-to-face vision. Such was the idea of God which Greek had failed to discover, which Jew had understood but feebly, and which Paul spent himself in declaring. New knowledge, knowl-edge, now power, new love were al-. I ready at hand. Newer knowledge newer powers, newer love were still to be added in the life to come. One Lord of faith enthroned above the God of Reason. Infinite intelligence, will and: power at the heart of things, and not blind necessity, or mocking fate. A God not insulated in his sympathies, but emptying himsejf to fill up our nothingness noth-ingness beyond ' measure. 'No, Paul, thou art not beside thyself, and much learning doth not make thee mad.' The scientific and religious considerations of the world had met in thee for fusion. fus-ion. Science the cold, indifferent search for abstract truth; religion the eager guest for a personal and intelligent intelli-gent relation. And deep down in the hearts of men religion triumphed and must needs ever triumph, the sole satisfactory sat-isfactory interpretation of the source and destiny of universal being.. ..- ' - The conception of the Supernatural, says St. Thomas, in reply to Siger of Brabant, the spokesman of the Arabs, is the conception of an order of truths above those of Reason and. the- conception concep-tion of an order of activity superior to, that of mind and matter, as theea latter lat-ter regularly display themselves in the field of natural phenomena. Superna-i Superna-i ture and nature are two orders, each of truth and activity, built the one upon the other. They are two stages in the realization of a single supreme divine purpose. The intellect of man, which is at best but a spectator of the panorama of the finite, not inventing, but simply discovering the facts and truths it sees?, has not the last word to say concerning the origin and destiny of things" terrestrial, ter-restrial, or of itself. It cannot reckon without its everlasting host, the Infinite In-finite Cod, who is back of all phenomena phenom-ena and under the petals of the lowliest flower that blows. To such an intellect, indeed, looking out upon the broad ex-' panse of visio creation and viewing it as a whole, beyond which there is nothing else, the. supernatural rr.ust, needs appear in the guise of a contradiction. contra-diction. But this apparent contradiction contradic-tion is entirely , in the false point of view, which contrasts nature and su-pernature su-pernature as two opposite and complete wholes, when they are, in fact, but the incomplete parts of one grand whole, more comprehensive than either, namely, name-ly, the world-plan in the mind of God. Turn the eye of Reason, says SL Thomas, Thom-as, away from nature; fix its gaze upon that Infinite Intelligence, Will and Power which nature herself discloses, at the root of things, and all your contradictions con-tradictions vanish. Nature will appear as realizing God's purpose incompletely; incomplete-ly; supernature, on a grander scale. Both are means', not ends; economies, not finalities; avenues, not goals; parts, not wholes. How- can they be contradictions? contra-dictions? Supernature is an addition to human nature, a complementary furtherance fur-therance of it along the line of its return re-turn to the eternal source from which it sprang. God has surely not called into .requisition the fullness- of his power, pow-er, nor exhausted the infinite store of his energy in the production of this limited lim-ited world of mind and sense. The sum of human-truth and the sum of cosmic .energy are surely not the gauge and measure of .divine knowledge and action. ac-tion. The limits we see, were surely not set by God to his own power, but to ours. The constancy of the universe is the constancy of the God who is back of it. There must be "truths in the Infinite Mind and power in the Infinite Will that exceed the constituted course of nature.' What, therefore, is to- hinder God from revealing himself, still more in the intellectual order, in the moral as well as in the physical; by calling Into activity this surplusage of power? In doing so, what else is his action but art addition tn th nrdinarv pfTlnioT- -of human understanding, human ' will, or natural force? Away with you Averroes, and fly into space! Nature's laws are" constant, if you will. Miracles Mira-cles do not affect tlieir constancy. -Neither does theology. They simply indicate indi-cate the self-existent asting on a higher high-er plane, and working out the one same eternally constant pian by means of a superior, parallel order of phenomena,1 Addition is the word, not contradiction. Faith adds to reason a body of new truths; grace adds to nature a higher state and a set of higher powers; miracles mira-cles add to ordinary efficiency; the Church' is the care-taker of the eternal end, while the State looks only to the temporal. Christ is the sum of history, and theology the sum of all philosophy. And imperfect man is led by this double set of agencies of Reason and Faith, of nature and of grace, of State and of Church, of study and of science arid of wonderment at miracle, to a fully developed, de-veloped, supernatural and everlasting selfhod in close, direct and unabating communion with the God of Glory, who is the final Goal of all development, the satisfaction of all desire, the expansion of all intelligence, and the solution of all mystery. ! Such is St. Paul in his own epistles, and as written out .to full stature in the course of Christian thought. Such is the message of this spokesman of the We are members of a university fifill-supernatural, fifill-supernatural, the patron of this faculty. facul-ty. We live in an environment todav which sorely needs just such an expansive expan-sive world-view, and we are members of a university whose deepest roots are stuck fast in tine reality of this higher life. About us are many men who have deluded themselvea into thinking that the truth of religion can be determined by studying its development, either in the individual or in the history of the race; who seem utterly unable to reflect that the psychological genesis of an idea is not to be confounded with its philosophical worth. ' They have hopelessly hope-lessly sunk the religious order in the physical; they are endeavoring to play the symphony of the universe backward, back-ward, and to listen once more, like old Pythagoras, t the- music of the spheres. Their 'Christianity is like the Salaminlan ship which, still pretending to' carry Theseus, has now, by reason of perpetual removals and repairs, little left of the original timber. They have become enthusiastic apostles of cosmic mo'tion, travestying the idea of the supernatural su-pernatural and aprodying it as the ghost and :hobgoisin'' of the-Semitic races stilt haunti.igv Christian thought. Hypnotized by the narrow, and arbitrary arbi-trary method which they profess, of viewing every idea solely in its origin, their eyes are blinded to the fact that the idea of the supernatural, although a product of faith, .is also a philosophic corollary of belief ? in an infinitely intelligent in-telligent God, and no relict of previous ghost ancestry or of eastern mysticiscn. Would that their blindness were like that of Paul on the road to Damascus. But we, members: of the line all, in a Catholic university, which cherishes a theistic philosophy that is no blank disc of indefiniteness, which points- out tine road to salntship as well aa to scholarship, and certainly .both . are equally hard, we, I say, should realize full well in our innermost religious selves that we shall miss both egreg-riously egreg-riously if, failing to cultivate the, sense and habit of the supernatural, we retro grade in .faith while advancing in knowledge." After the religious ceremonies . the Right Rev. Rector entertained -the, Apostolic Delegate, Most. Rev. Archbishop Arch-bishop Martinelli, Bishop-elect Sbare-tai, Sbare-tai, Rev. Dr. Rooker, Rev. Dr. Magnien of St. Mary's Seminary, Baltimore, the Dtara of the different faculties and the members of the Faculty of Theology. ' -?- - The January number of the Bulletin contains a number of articles that will repay perusal. Rev. Dr. Pace writes on the "Concept of Immortality in the Philosophy of St. Thomas." The relations rela-tions of the soul to the organism during life --is outlined, and the consequent moaning of death is shown in its bearing bear-ing upon the vital function. "The Priesthood and the Social Movement"-' j is treated by Rev. Dr. Kirby, who-calls;' attention to the fact that on all sides the question is being asked: Is our civilization civ-ilization Christian? What is Christian-, ity worth? He reviews four classes of answers made, lawing particular stress on that the Catholic Church. Rev. Dr. Henebry has ' a paper on Eugene O'Growney and the Revival of Gaelic," which contair. an account of the principal prin-cipal eyents in British and Irish history his-tory in their bearings upon the question ques-tion of language. "The Poetry of Israel" is the title of an article by Ernestv-" is the title of an article by Eneas-B. Eneas-B. Goodwin, who has made independent examination of the Hebrew Scriptures,, in order to ascertain the use and influence influ-ence of poetry on the social life of the early Israelites. And Dr. Shahan treats of; a new edition of the works of Hlp-polytus, Hlp-polytus, a Roman writer of the third century. The Bulletin contains, .jbe-e'ldes," .jbe-e'ldes," a number of important 'and lengthy book reviews, an account ;of Archbishop Keane's collecting tour, and the usual university chronicle. ' The Right Rev. Rector was in Worcester Wor-cester lately, and delivered the- principal; princi-pal; address at the Alumni association meeting of Holy Cross College.. He .will speak in Chicago on Feb. 7. Right Rev. Bishop Beaven was the guest of the Rector during a short visit to the university uni-versity last week. 'I |
