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Show Uncle Jack asid .Bfsltepbew. fiSBXa The conversation last week was altogether al-together taken up by Uncle Jack's comprehensive reply to his nephew, who inquired why the Catholic church did not assert the equality of all men and compel all to live together as brothers. Uncle Jacjc reviewed the careers ca-reers of historical personages of Catholic Cath-olic times, and showed that it was not those who obeyetl the church and accepted ac-cepted her principles and maxims w ho brought evil upon her. "Those tyrannical tyran-nical princes, kings and emperors, like Henry IV of Germany, Frederick Bar-barossa, Bar-barossa, Frederick II, Louis of Bavaria, Philip the Fair, Henry and his son John of England, Charles le Mauvais, and Pedro the Cruel, were not obedient, but most disobedient, sons of the church, Protestants before Luther, who made war on her and incurred her anathema. They oppressed her and their subjects in spite of reclamations. As a general rule, the civil authority, even in Catholic Cath-olic states, has always been jealous of the ecclesiastic authority, and restrict ed as much as it could its free and full exercise." Dick, apparently not satisfied with his, uncle's explanation, puts the inquiry in-quiry which begins this week's installment install-ment of the conversation. CONVERSATION V (Concluded.) "But you evade the point of my objection, ob-jection, Uncle Jack. If your church be what she professes to be, how happens hap-pens it that there are so many wicked princes and other persons in her bosom? bos-om? Why did she not reform them, make them good and docile Catholics? I admit all you say; but these very persons to whom you charge all the evils I find recorded in the history of Catholic nations had all beep baptized and brought up as Catholics. I do not deny, but assert their wickedness. My difficulty is, how, if the church be as powerful for good as she pretends, and affords all the helps needed to virtue, they could be so wicked. I have read your Catholic histories of the reformers. reform-ers. According to these histories the reformers wrere a set of as great rascals ras-cals as ever lived, and I have no doubt of the fact. I think that you fully prove it. But this relieves not the difficulty. dif-ficulty. The more wicked and unprincipled unprin-cipled you prove them, the more to my mind you prove against the church, the more completely you establish her inefficiency, her inability to effect what is avowedly her purpose. These reformers re-formers had all been reared in her bosom; they had all, according to you, been regenerated in baptism, had been born again, received the gift of faith, the grace of the sacraments, and been elevated to the plane of a supernatural destiny. They had received all your church had to give. How, then, if she is able to fulfill all her magnificent promises, could such a set of men come out of her communion, or possibly pos-sibly become so grossly depraved as they most undeniably were before they openly abandoned her? Here is my difficulty which you do not meet. Is not the existence of such men, of such men as Achilles and the Gavazzis, in the bosom of your church a practical refutation of her claims?" "I understand from the outset your difficulty, or the point of your objection, ob-jection, my dear Dick, and had no intention in-tention of evading it. The objection, though fatal to Protestanism as a religion, re-ligion, is in the- non-Catholic mind, practically the gravest objection to the church that can be urged; and I well recollect that I found it, after having rejected Protestantism, the greatest and last obstacle in my own mind to be overcome in embracing the church. I had lived as a man of the world, as a non-Catholic man, of the world, not infrequently lives, and strayed far from the path of virtue, and fallen far lower than I care to state. I tried to recover myself, but I found myself too weak. I was sinking, and I had no strength to arrest my fall. I wanted help, something to breathe life into my soul, give strength to my soul, give strength to my will, and light to my understanding. The church proffered me this'help, and told me that in her sacraments, which were the channels of grace, I would find precisely what I wanted. But could I trust her? If she communicates through her sacraments, sacra-ments, the graces she alleges, how comes that so many that have received these graces have lost their faith and virtue, and become, the vilest and most abandoned of the race, as apostate Catholics usually are? These undeniably undenia-bly wicked men who have been reared in the bosom of the church, who must have approached her sacraments, and, therefore, received ull needful supernatural super-natural help, if such helps the church has to give, were to me a long time a real stumbling diock, tor meir existence exist-ence seemed to me an unanswerable proof that the church does not and' cannot give the assistance which I needed and which she promises. But I became able finally to understand that my objection grew out of her Protestant and Puritan education, which had taught me that grace is irresistible ir-resistible and inadmissiabie. Your difficulty dif-ficulty is, given the church as a medium me-dium of supernatural grace, which su-pernaturalizes su-pernaturalizes and sanctifies, how can one of her members fall away, or lapse into iniquity and unbelief? Or how can one baptized and reared in the bosom of the church ever be a bad Catholic and a bad man? The answer is easy. Man was created and intended intend-ed to be a free moral agent, and the church was never intended to take away his free agency, or to deprive him of his free will. Man in the church, as out of her, retain? hf free will, and therefore the faculty of obeying obey-ing or disobeying, as he elects. This free will the church respects, and, therefore, whatever assistance she renders, it must be assistance which' is compatible with it. She can aid, but not compel, the power of resistance resist-ance is always retained by the Catholic. Cath-olic. Consequently, the question. How can there be a bad Catholic? is not other than the question. How can there be a bad man or a sinner at all? There is then no special difficulty in the case. There is only the general difficulty with regard to the origin of evil, which we have already considered j : . cnA nf "You do not really see this, because, having been reared a Protestant, you have no conception of grace that does not operate irresistibly, or of grace that aids and assists free will without superseding it. Sufficient grace that is inefficacious strikes you as an absurdity, ab-surdity, and you relish Voltaire's ridicule ridi-cule of it. But grace can always be resisted. re-sisted. To concur with grace, indeed, demands grace, but to resist grace does not. We are .always competent to do that of ourselves alone. The grace that we receive in baptism imparts to us the habit of faith and justice or sanctity, sanc-tity, but the habit is not the act, either of faith or justice. It gives us, as a faith, the power to elicit the act, or actually to believe what God has revealed re-vealed when duly propounded to the understanding, which is beyond our natural ability; but it does not compel com-pel us to elicit that act, and we can refuse to do so. But this refusal a formal refusal, I mean we lose the habit, and thus become infidels, or heretics. her-etics. The point you are to bear in mind is, that the grace or gift of faith does not compel us to believe; only gives us the power to believe, and a certain faculty in believing what God reveals and the church teaches. We are aided, not forced, by it. If we formally for-mally refuse, wp lose that power and facility, and our understanding becomes be-comes darkened. We then lose, not only our love, but even our perception of the truth, as is perhaps always the case with confirmed heretics and apostates. They fall anew under the power of satan, and become the prey to all his delusions, so that it is really possible that they persuade themselves that their errors are truths, and become so deluded as to acually believe a lie, that, having pleasure in iniquity, they are damned. This explains how men who have received the gift of faith may I lose it, and become heretics and apostates. apos-tates. But generally, perhaps always, the refusal to elicit the act fo faith is preceded by the act of justice. Sanctifying Sancti-fying grace, when no obstruction is offered on our part, places us in a state of justice, but it does not compel us to remain in that state. We are still free agents, and, therefore, may, instead of eliciting acts of holiness, resist re-sist the grace of God, and fall into mortal sin. By mortal sin we lose that grace, all that it gave us, and come again under the power of satan. Thus nothing prevents the Catholic, if he chooses, from rejecting all the graces wawiamciiM, dli IUC iliU ilia church affords him, and running a wild career of incredulity and iniquity. All in the church are not of the church. She is that gospel net, which, if cast into the sea, gathered fishes of all Sorts, both good and bad, and hence we find among Catholics all sorts of persons, good, bad and indifferent. We should be not, therefore, surprsed to find many passing for Catholics, who yet, in reality, real-ity, have not more faith than Protestants, Protest-ants, and not more virtue than heathens. heath-ens. This makes nothing against the church, if you once understand that grace does not take away free will, and is not inadmissible." "I can understand all ' that, but it does not remove m3- whole difficulty. If people can, with the church, lose their faith and their virtue, I do not see what mighty advantage she is to mankind." "That is only because you are thinking think-ing only of good or evil in relation to the natural and temporal order, and do not at all take into account the supernatural super-natural providence of God, and man's supernatural destiny, in the world to come; but also in some respects because be-cause you have no conception of free will. Your humanists, who worship a people-god, to use the barbarous expression ex-pression of an Italian chief, have no just conception of the dignity and freedom free-dom of man. You do not, perhaps you cannot, understand the immense superiority su-periority of a being endowed with a free will over a creature that acts solely from intrinsic necessity. Your highest conception of liberty is freedom free-dom from coercion,' or from external restraint or compulsion. You never rise above the conceotion of the ani mal man. Man is for you only a superior su-perior sort of animal, standing at the head of the order of the mammalia, and it is only for man as an animal that in all your plans of reform you seek to provide. You recognize in him no rational soul, and you place, as you have avowed, his highest worth in his instinctive and involuntary activity. Hence you place instinctive and impulsive im-pulsive love above duty. With these low and groveling conceptions of man it is not easy for you to understand the importance which is to be attached to free will. But you would prize an homage freely and voluntarily offered to you by one of your friends, more than an homage offered you through compulsion or necessity. You should know that: God made thee perfect, not immutable; And good he made thee, but to persevere. He left it in thy power, ordain'd thy will By nature free, not overruled by fate Inextricable, or strict necessity; Our voluntary service he requires. Not our necessitated: such -with him Finds no acceptance, nor can find; for how Can hearts not free be tried whether they serve Willing or no, who will but what they must By destiny, and can no other choose?" "Without free will man would not rise to the scale of being above the ox or the hog, the beaver or the ant, and virtue would not differ in principle prin-ciple from gravitation or chemical affinity. af-finity. The freedom you talk so much about, and for which you set at defiance de-fiance the laws of God and man, would be but an unmeaning word. There is freedom only for a being possessing free will, which is the highest expression expres-sion of his radical nature, partaking at once of intellect and 'volition. This free will God himself " respects, and never does or suffers violence to be done by it. God redeems man, and governs him as endowed with free will. The grace he confers, the aid he vouchsafes in the church, are all granted and operate in accordance with it, and therefore may be resisted. But this does not imply that the church is of no value. If she furnishes the aid needed to enable man to be and do what were impossible without it; you cannot say that she is of no importance because a man willfully rejects re-jects depriving man of his free will, that is, without making them cease to be men. That is all that she ever promised to do, and all that is or can be required of her. You have but to listen and obey, and even not that in your own strength, and the end is gained. Your objection is futile, for it is always something that help is at hand." (To be Continued.) |
