l become me, as
if I were afraid of truth of any kind, to blame those who pursue secular
facts, by means of the reason which God has given them, to their logical
conclusions: or to be angry with science, because religion is bound in
duty to take cognizance of its teaching. But putting these particular
classes of men aside, as having no special call on the sympathy of the
Catholic, of course he does most deeply enter into the feelings of a
fourth and large class of men, in the educated portions of society, of
religious and sincere minds, who are simply perplexed,--frightened or
rendered desperate, as the case may be,--by the utter confusion into
which late discoveries or speculations have thrown their most elementary
ideas of religion. Who does not feel for such men? who can have one
unkind thought of them? I take up in their behalf St. Augustine's
beautiful words, "Illi in vos saeviant," &c. Let them be fierce with you
who have no experience of the difficulty with which error is
discriminated from truth, and the way of life is found amid the
illusions of the world. How many a Catholic has in his thoughts followed
such men, many of them so good, so true, so noble! how often has the
wish risen in his heart that some one from among his own people should
come forward as the champion of revealed truth against its opponents!
Various persons, Catholic and Protestant, have asked me to do so myself;
but I had several strong difficulties in the way. One of the greatest is
this, that at the moment it is so difficult to say precisely what it is
that is to be encountered and overthrown. I am far from denying that
scientific knowledge is really growing, but it is by fits and starts;
hypotheses rise and fall; it is difficult to anticipate which of them
will keep their ground, and what the state of knowledge in relation to
them will be from year to year. In this condition of things, it has
seemed to me to be very undignified for a Catholic to commit himself to
the work of chasing what might turn out to be phantoms, and, in behalf
of some special objections, to be ingenious in devising a theory, which,
before it was completed, might have to give place to some theory newer
still, from the fact that those former objections had already come to
nought under the uprising of others. It seemed to be specially a time,
in which Christians had a call to be patient, in which they had no other
way of helping those who were alarmed, than that of exhor