te of a past ceremonial
or an extinct nationalism. We are not living in an age of wealth and
loyalty, of pomp and stateliness, of time-honoured establishments, of
pilgrimage and penance, of hermitages and convents in the wild, and of
fervent populations supplying the want of education by love, and
apprehending in form and symbol what they cannot read in books. Our rules
and our rubrics have been altered now to meet the times, and hence an
obsolete discipline may be a present heresy.

8.

I have been pointing out how the Fine Arts may prejudice Religion, by
laying down the law in cases where they should be subservient. The
illustration is analogous rather than strictly proper to my subject, yet I
think it is to the point. If then the most loyal and dutiful children of
the Church must deny themselves, and do deny themselves, when they would
sanctify to a heavenly purpose sciences as sublime and as divine as any
which are cultivated by fallen man, it is not wonderful, when we turn to
sciences of a different character, of which the object is tangible and
material, and the principles belong to the Reason, not to the Imagination,
that we should find their disciples, if disinclined to the Catholic Faith,
acting the part of opponents to it, and that, as may often happen, even
against their will and intention. Many men there are, who, devoted to one
particular subject of thought, and making its principles the measure of
all things, become enemies to Revealed Religion before they know it, and,
only as time proceeds, are aware of their own state of mind. These, if
they are writers or lecturers, while in this state of unconscious or
semi-conscious unbelief, scatter infidel principles under the garb and
colour of Christianity; and this, simply because they have made their own
science, whatever it is, Political Economy, or Geology, or Astronomy, to
the neglect of Theology, the centre of all truth, and view every part or
the chief parts of knowledge as if developed from it, and to be tested and
determined by its principles. Others, though conscious to themselves of
their anti-christian opinions, have too much good feeling and good taste
to obtrude them upon the world. They neither wish to shock people, nor to
earn for themselves a confessorship which brings with it no gain. They
know the strength of prejudice, and the penalty of innovation; they wish
to go through life quietly; they scorn polemics; they shrink, as from a
real h