a became a system of contradictions, more
or less successfully harmonized. The Trinity was a kind of pact between
monotheism and polytheism, and humanity and divinity sealed a peace in
Christ, nature covenanted with grace, grace with free will, free will
with the Divine prescience, and so on. And it is perhaps true, as
Hermann says (_loc. cit._), that "as soon as we develop religious
thought to its logical conclusions, it enters into conflict with other
ideas which belong equally to the life of religion." And this it is that
gives to Catholicism its profound vital dialectic. But at what a cost?

At the cost, it must needs be said, of doing violence to the mental
exigencies of those believers in possession of an adult reason. It
demands from them that they shall believe all or nothing, that they
shall accept the complete totality of dogma or that they shall forfeit
all merit if the least part of it be rejected. And hence the result, as
the great Unitarian preacher Channing pointed out,[25] that in France
and Spain there are multitudes who have proceeded from rejecting Popery
to absolute atheism, because "the fact is, that false and absurd
doctrines, when exposed, have a natural tendency to beget scepticism in
those who received them without reflection. None are so likely to
believe too little as those who have begun by believing too much." Here
is, indeed, the terrible danger of believing too much. But no! the
terrible danger comes from another quarter--from seeking to believe with
the reason and not with life.

The Catholic solution of our problem, of our unique vital problem, the
problem of the immortality and eternal salvation of the individual soul,
satisfies the will, and therefore satisfies life; but the attempt to
rationalize it by means of dogmatic theology fails to satisfy the
reason. And reason has its exigencies as imperious as those of life. It
is no use seeking to force ourselves to consider as super-rational what
clearly appears to us to be contra-rational, neither is it any good
wishing to become coalheavers when we are not coalheavers.
Infallibility, a notion of Hellenic origin, is in its essence a
rationalistic category.

Let us now consider the rationalist or scientific solution--or, more
properly, dissolution--of our problem.

FOOTNOTES:

[13] Erwin Rohde, _Psyche_, "Seelencult und Unsterblichkeitsglaube der
Griechen." Tuebingen, 1907. Up to the present this is the leading work
dealing with the b