The author commences: "I am a Catholic. I accept the divine
authority of the Catholic Church to interpret the meaning of human
life, and in this interpretation I have gradually found a Catholic
Ideal. I was not born into this system, I deliberately adopted it.
I was born into that variegated and shifting mass of opinion,
external to the Church, which leans more or less on individual
private judgment as an habitual court of appeal in matters of faith
and morals." And consider this later on: "If God be the Author and
Sustainer of the material universe and civil society, and if man,
sensible of his own frailty, ambitious for his own perfection, and
anxious as to a future state, wills to communicate with his
Creator, what hope has he of any possible intercourse between God
and man? To deny the religious aspirations of the human race would
be to deny ourselves; but it will be objected that man's hunger for
righteousness is no guarantee of its supreme embodiment in a
personal God. United with this aspiration, however, stands the
conviction of the intellect that some intelligent First Cause must
be predicated for the universe, and the judgment of the moral sense
which claims divine beneficence for a final restitution of all
things. To deny a First Cause is to dethrone the only Sovereign
Good able to fill the human heart, the only tribunal before which
man can arraign his secret soul, setting up instead the fool's
fetish of cosmic anarchy, which gives no rational explanation of
the universal testimony of the human race in favour of an
intelligent and moral Creator." And then this: "But let us look at
the great religious phenomena of the world, the ancient religions
of Egypt, Assyria, Greece, Rome, India, and Western Europe. The old
surviving religions, Hindu, Buddhist, Mohammedan, Confucian, or the
fetish and ancestral worships of primitive tribes; do they not form
a spectacle similar to the varied geology and zoology of the
material world? Detached on the surface, they are united below in
certain broad features. They recognise supernatural powers acting
on the world, and possess traditional sacred teachings preserved by
priests or sages. Such similarities point to a common origin,
differentiated by the reflex action of racial and local tradition,
and demonstrate the universal desire of man's heart for some form
of faith and holiness."
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