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.
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