An Inquiry into the Principles of Church Authority; or, Reasons for recalling my Subscription to the Royal Supremacy. By the REV. R. I. V. ITALY AND THE CHRISTIAN ALLIANCE 1. Il Protestantesimo e la Regola di Fede. Per GIOVANNI PERRONE. 2. Dissertazione Storico-Teologica, del P. GABRIELLE BIBBIA. VI. A KNOW-NOTHING LEGISLATURE 1. "Our Houses are our Castles": a Review of the Proceedings of the Nunnery Committee of the Massachusetts Legislature. By CHARLES 2. Report of the Joint Special Committee appointed to investigate the Conduct of the Committee on the Petition of E. P. Carpenter and others. 3. Report of the Special Committee appointed to investigate the Con- duct of Joseph Hiss, Member of the House. 4. Report of the Joint Special Committee on the Petition of E. P. Carpenter and others, in Relation to Nunneries, &c. 5. Report of the Committee to whom was referred the Report of a former Committee appointed to investigate the Conduct of Mr. Hiss. I. THE TEMPORAL POWER OF THE POPE. The Temporal Power of the Pope; containing the Speech of the Hon. Joseph R. Chandler, delivered in the House of Representatives of the United States, January 11, 1855. With Nine Letters, stating the prevailing Roman Catholic Theory in the Language of Papal Writers, The Philosophical Works of DAVID HUME. IV. VENTURA ON PHILOSOPHY AND CATHOLICITY La Raison Philosophique et la Raison Catholique. Par le T. R. P. BROWNSON'S QUARTERLY REVIEW. JANUARY, 1855. ART. I. Philosophie. De la Connaissance de Dieu. Par A. GRATRY, Prêtre de l'Oratoire de l'Immaculée Conception. Paris Charles Dunoiol; Lecoffre et Cie. 1853. 2 tomes. 8vo. M. GRATRY has here attempted a work of the highest importance, and much needed to meet the moral and intellectual wants of our times. No higher subject than God can occupy our thoughts, and no knowledge can compare, in dignity, interest, and value, with the knowledge of God. Indeed, as without God there is nothing, for all things are by him, in him, and for him, so without knowledge of him there is no knowledge at all. He who knows not God knows nothing, and hence the deep significance of the Holy Scripture which calls him a fool who denies God, — Dixit insipiens in corde suo, non est Deus. The highest wisdom is to know God, and the supreme good is to know and love him. The greatest service, therefore, which can be rendered to genuine science and to mankind, is to furnish solid instruction as to the means and conditions of the knowledge and love of God, and to stimulate men to seek him as the "first good and the first fair." A service of this sort is attempted by the learned, pious, and philosophical author in these profound and highly interesting volumes. Whether he has succeeded in all respects or not in accomplishing the end he proposed to himself, he has certainly made an attempt in the right direction, and the most considerable attempt that has been recently 1 made. His work may not be faultless, it may fail in some respects to satisfy the truly philosophic mind, but it is full of rich and suggestive thoughts, and well fitted to raise modern philosophy from a dead scholasticism, and to breathe into it the breath of life, to give it a living soul, and to render it vigorous and productive. The author enters his protest against the dead abstractions of the schools, against the dry and barren logic of mere speculative reason, and rejects all speculation that leaves out the heart and its wants, as well as all philosophy detached from theology. He seeks to rehabilitate reason indeed, depreciated by modern sceptics, sentimentalists, and traditionalists, but also to give the heart a place in our speculations, and revelation its share in raising us to a knowledge of God. He calls his philosophy Theodicy (from ecós, God, and din, justice), the Divine Justice, in order to show that our primary and chief knowledge of God is under the relation of morality, as the object of the heart, rather than of the pure intellect. If we understand him, we are first moved to seek God by a moral want, and we recognize him first in the heart as the object to which it tends, under the relation of good, or beatitude, and our knowledge of him increases in proportion as the heart becomes pure, and its love free and strong. But as the desire of beatitude cannot be satisfied without the intuitive vision of God as he is in himself, which is not naturally possible, there is necessary to complete the knowledge of God craved by the soul supernatural revelation or faith, and ultimately the ens supernaturale. In other words, as the soul cannot find the beatitude it desires in the natural order, a philosophy confined to that order, or detached from supernatural revelation, can never be adequate to its wants. The soul taken in its actual state has, so to speak, a natural want or desire of the supernatural vision of God as the complement of its beatitude. The supernatural is not naturally attainable, and therefore a purely natural or rational philosophy, since by its own nature confined to the natural order, is inadequate even to the natural wants of the soul. Hence its deficiency must be supplied by supernatural philosophy, or the Christian revelation. The author takes here philosophy as the answer to the moral wants of the soul as well as to its intellectual wants, and includes under it what is supplied supernaturally as well as what is supplied naturally, or by our natural reason and strength. He therefore labors to enrich philosophy by introducing the element of love, and to complete it by supernatural revelation. Certainly we are not the man to complain of this. We applaud the attempt with all our heart. It is a work of no slight importance in our day to restore reason to its rights, and to recall the age to its dictates. The author is perfectly right when he maintains that reason is at present more in danger than revelation. Men, we mean the men who represent the age, have lost their faith in reason, and will not use it reasonably. One class distrust it, and tend to universal scepticism. They do not believe that anything can be known; they despair of all certainty, fall into religious indifference, and live and die as the beasts that perish. Another class, and much more numerous than is commonly believed, decry reason in order to exalt sentiment. These are such as decry doctrine and praise feeling, and say, "Away with your dogmatic theology, your philosophical abstractions, and your ethical rules, and give us the heart," the modern cant of your Evangelicals, Methodists, and Transcendentalists. You cannot reason with these people. If you address their understanding, they fly to feeling; if you address their feelings, they fly to understanding. Sustain your positions by logic, and they tell you that the logic of the heart is far above the logic of the head; bring forward evidence that no reason can gainsay, and they remain unmoved, for they do not feel with you. Another class decry reason in order to exalt tradition, and, like Kant in his Kritik der reinen Vernunft, "demolish science to make way for faith." These have honest intentions, are moved by praiseworthy motives, but they damage the cause they have at heart; for never can we build faith on scepticism, or science on faith. Revelation presupposes reason, and in denying reason you deny equally revelation and the possibility of revelation; for revelation can be made only to a rational subject. It is well against these to assert reason, and to let all the world know that in asserting revelation we presuppose reason instead of denying it. This point is capital. Man is a rational animal, and reason is his characteristic, as well as his noblest attribute. He cannot suppress his reason without suppressing his humanity, without foregoing his manhood and making himself practically a brute. We do not, by asserting that God has made a revelation to man, supersede reason, or forbid him to exercise it. The revelation assists reason, it does not annul it. It brings to reason a higher and purer light than its own, but removes none of its laws, abridges no sphere of its activity, and impedes in no respect its free and full exercise. It elevates it, clarifies it, and extends its vision, but does not deny, enchain, or enslave it. The authority which the Catholic claims for revelation, or for the Church in teaching and defining it, does not enslave reason, or require it to surrender a single one of its original rights; it enables it to retain and exercise all its rights, and to attain lovingly to a truth higher and vaster than its own. Man is naturally bound to receive and conform to the truth, and is it to offer an indignity to his freedom to present him more truth than he is naturally able to apprehend? Does the astronomer complain of the telescope, because by it he explores vast fields of the heavens invisible to his naked eye? Is his natural eye superseded or closed, because, in order to see more than it can attain, a telescope must be used, or because he must govern himself by what he sees through his telescope as well as by what he sees without it? Why then complain of revelation, that it is derogatory to reason? or of the assertion of its authority? Is not truth always authoritative? Why should revealed truth be less so than natural truth? The astronomer would be as angry at us were we to deny the objects revealed by his telescope, as he would were we to deny the objects visible to his naked eye, and he would call us fools for disputing them, because visible only by means of the telescope. The author has also done good service to the cause of truth by introducing the element of love into philosophy. It cannot be denied that the tendency of scholasticism, with its dry abstractions, its syllogisms, and subtile distinctions, is to lose sight of the true under its form of the good and the beautiful, as addressed to the heart and the affections. Man is not pure intellect, any more than he is pure sentiment. He is body and soul, and his soul is endowed with the power to know, to love, and to will, and his need to love is greater than his need to know, and indeed he needs to know only in order to love and obey. Knowledge distinctively considered is never the end. It is |