Catholicity and Pantheism

The aim which we have had in view, has been as much the refutation of Pantheism, as the satisfaction of a strong desire on our part of presenting the whole body of Catholic truths in all their universality, unity, grandeur, and beauty. We are firmly convinced, with all the thinking minds of the century, that the form of controversy with the human mind, as exhibited in all the signs of the present time, must be thoroughly changed. Hitherto, we have endeavored to lead men's minds to Catholic truth by external evidence; we must now change our tactics and convince them by internal evidence. When, at the dawn of Protestantism, the human mind rebelled against the authority of the Church, it did not and could not reject all other dogmatic truths, and the consequences resulting from them, by the action of which European society had been formed and which had been so deeply rooted in men's minds, as to become -the very flesh and blood of Christendom. Men then unable to throw off the habit of thinking, which they had inherited from sixteen Christian centuries; a habit which had grown with their growth, and which everything around them, language, customs, laws, arts and sciences cop-spired to make deeper and deeper, were forced almost instinctively to admit most of revealed truth. It was easy, then, for the controversialist to take a standing-point from the dogmatic truths fully admitted and agreed upon by his adversary, and to show how necessarily and logically they led to the admission of the authority of the Church. But the steady and swift work of three centuries of demolition, the action of that principle of disintegration proclaimed by Luther have not only eliminated from men's minds all dogmatic truth, but have given them a sceptical turn of mind, which will take nothing for granted, unless sifted to the very bottom, unless accompanied by internal evidence as far as the subject will admit. In former times it was not difficult to convince a man who believed in the existence, and had a true idea, of God, who admitted the possibility of revelation, that of miracles and prophecies, how logically these things pointed out to the existence of an infallible authority, and led him necessarily to the Church. External evidence was, as it were, a home argument to him, because it chimed in and agreed with the bent of his mind. But now that he does not believe in, nor has a true idea of, God, who rejects scornfully all possibility of anything supernatural and superintelligible, it is impossible for us to follow the beaten track, but must find a new way of presenting the Catholic truths to him; that is to lay them out before him in all the internal evidence of which they are capable internal evidence, which results not only from reasons, with which each particular truth may be supported, but that which emanates from the link by which all truths hang upon each other, from the bearing which they have on all the fundamental problems raised by the human mind; from the "relations they possess with all the orders of human knowledge; in a word, do not present to man's mind all the truths of the Church only piecemeal, and, as it were, dissect ed (this has to be be done to obtain an accurate idea of them) but lay them out before him, as it were, in a beautiful panorama, one depending on the other, and all forming a most compact and harmonious whole; show him how the system fits his mind, and satisfies the best aspirations of his soul; inculcate upon him that the system alone is the type of all intelligibility, all life, all beauty, that it is the pattern and origin of all science, all action, all arts, and man's mind, which, after all, was made for truth, will naturally, and almost instinctively, embrace it. This is what we attempted to do in th: s work, of which only a portion of the first part appears now, under the title of Catholicity and Pantheism