and the teaching of the Gentiles in natural ethics, forms still the basis of the teaching of our own moral theologians. The jus gentium of the ancient Greeks and Romans is the foundation of the laws which are held even now to be binding upon all nations, We, of course, mean not to deny the gross errors and abominable practices of the ancient or modern heathen; but we do deny that these errors are the errors of reason, or that reason ever approves these practices. They were and are seen by reason to be contrary to her own dictates. What Calvinist does not see that his Calvinism is unreasonable? or believes he can defend it without maintaining that reason is a false and deceptive light not to be trusted? The false religions and abominable superstitions of the old heathen world were never the creations of reason, and were as repugnant to the reason of their adherents as they are to ours. Reason no more approved of the human sacrifices, the prostitutions, the cruelties, and gross impurities of those superstitions, the Bacchic and Isiac orgies, or the worship of the phallus, than it does of the decretum horribile defended by John Calvin in his Institutes. We know it from the writings of Gentile philosophers and sages themselves, and from the arguments used against them by the free and acute reason of the fathers of the Church. These superstitions all grew up out of the perversion and corruption, due not to reason, but to ignorance, passion, or lust, aided by Satanic influence, of the original supernatural revelation made to our first parents, and were submitted to not as rational convictions, but as commands of the gods. St. Paul, in the first chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, vindicates reason, and gives us the key to the origin and existence of these abominable superstitions. "The wrath of God from heaven," he says, "is revealed upon all impiety and injustice of those men who detain the truth of God in injustice; because that which is known of God is manifest to them. For God hath manifested it to them. For his invisible things from the creation of the world are seen, being understood by those things which are made; his eternal power also and divinity: so that they are inexcusable. Because, when they knew God they did not glorify him as God, or give thanks; but they became foolish in their thoughts, and their senseless heart was darkened; for saying that they were wise they became fools. And they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness and image of corruptible man, and of birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping The Scriptures mean by a "fool," not a man destitute of knowledge, but one destitute of wisdom, or the true application of what he knows. It is clear from this passage, and what follows, that the ancients knew the truth of God, that neither their reason nor their knowledge was at fault, and therefore, they were inexcusable; for they, through self-conceit, pride, passion, sensuality, perverted in practice the truth they knew. There is nothing worse than the perversion or corruption of that which is good, and revelation is sure to be perverted or corrupted if left to be applied by private judgment and passion. The great evil was in what is called the Gentile apostasy, followed and in part produced by the dispersion of the human race after the confusion of language at Babel, and their division into separate tribes and nations. Unity in the supernatural was lost; pride and passion became its interpreters; and Satan, scizing on these as his ministers, originated the terrible superstitions of the ole world, brought reason and will into bondage to the flesh, and established his own worship in the place of that of God, as in time he will do with those who now follow the Protestant apostasy, if they do not return to unity and submit to the divinely-assisted guidance of the Holy Catholic Church; for though they have reason, they have no sure guide in the order of the supernatural. The cause will not lie in the insufficiency of reason in her own order, but it does not and cannot enlighten,-not in the corruption of in their attempting to make it serve them in an order which nature, but in their neglect of the means of grace, without they cannot live the life of Christ. which Here we find a reason why our author, if successful, would do the world a most serious injury. We have shown him that we have all that is in reason and the natural order, and therefore that by reducing Christianity to pure rationalism, he can give us nothing that we have not already in as great perfection at least as he has. But we tell him he would deprive us of what is necessary to save the world now, that by depriving us of what we have that he has not, from the abominable superstitions and practices of the hea *Romans, i. 18-24, et seq. then world. He cannot keep the world at the point of pure rationalism. All history proves it. There is more in the world than rationalism. There is more than simple nature. God placed man in the beginning under a supernatural providence, and gave him a supernatural revelation, because he would ennoble him, and give him a higher good than it is possible for any creature to attain to by his natural strength and faculties. He gave him a supernatural religion. But this supernatural religion becomes a savor of life unto life to the willing and obedient, and a savor of death unto death to the indocile and the disobedient. There is no use in quarrelling with this, for the fact is so, and cannot be changed by us. Now, if we attempt to break from this religion, and to suffice for ourselves, we fall away from reason itself, come under the dominion of the flesh, and run into all the absurd and abominable superstitions of the heathen. The world cannot desert the true supernatural and fall back on the purely natural, and remain there; it can only desert the true supernatural for the false, leave God only for the devil. You have, practically, no alternative between Christianity and superstition. This is seen even now in our own country. They who had gone farthest in infidelity have become spiritists and demon-worshippers. They have not remained with rationalism, but have passed on to superstition, and a superstition, which, if not checked, will hardly fail to equal the grossest, the most abominable, the most inhuman, and the most impure recorded in history. With individuals it has already gone nearly as far. The only protection against the false is the possession of the true. The only safeguard against superstition is true religion, the religion of Christ, as infallibly taught by his Church. Here is a consideration that we address to the benevolence, the humanity, to the justice of the author. Religion men will have, or if not religion, superstition. Let him regard that as a "fixed fact." If we deprive them of Catholicity, of the true religion in its purity and integrity, we plunge them into superstition, and cover the land anew with horrors. The author, then, in his undertaking, can do us no good, but may do us infinite harm. We tell him we cannot live in this bleak and wintry world without clothes. We must have something to cover the nakedness of nature. Let him ponder this well. It alone should teach him to abandon his work of destruction, and to cease to serve Apollyon. We have, of course, other and stronger reasons to allege, but this, of itself, is sufficient, and is enough for the present. We shall, as we proceed in the discussion to which he has invited us, show him that in his warring against Christianity as a supernatural religion, he is warring against the truth, against God himself, as well as against the true interests of both man and society. ART. II.-Pape et Empereur. Par J. M. CAYLA. Paris: Dentu. 1860. 8vo. pp. 32. MR. CAYLA's weak and silly pamphlet, Pope and Emperor, has made no little noise among non-Catholics, and considerable importance has been attached to it on the supposition that it was written under imperial inspiration to prepare the French mind for a separation of the Church in France from communion with Rome, and its erection into a schismatic national Church under the Emperor as its Supreme Pontiff. We think this supposition is gratuitous. We find in the pamphlet no mark of the imperial mind, and we detect in the policy it recommends no Idée Napoléonienne. The Emperor may have been quite willing to Permit its publication, but its responsibility, we presume, rests with the obscure journalist under whose name it is sent forth. any We think none too well of the Emperor's Catholicity to believe him capable of adopting the policy recommended by Mr. Cayla, if he regarded it as necessary or useful to his own interests or those of his dynasty; or, at least, of postponing or sacrificing the interests of the Church, without scruple, to what he regards as the interests of the state; yet we do not believe him hostile to the Church, unless where she is hostile to him; and we believe him too able a politician not to see that he could gain nothing, and might lose much by separating from Rome and placing himself at the head of a schismatic Church. He has no religious motives, and we can see no political reasons he can have for doing it. France is the most powerful Catholic nation in the world, and could gain no increase of power or consideration by breaking with the Pope, and placing herself on the line with other heretical or schisShe has nothing to fear from the politics of matic states. Rome, for she is strong enough to defeat any coalition of Catholic powers the Pope, if so disposed, could form against her. The other Catholic powers, with Austria at their head, would not be a match for her, and could defeat her arms or her policy only by coalitions with non-Catholic powers; and these coalitions could be as easily formed against her as a schismatic power, as they could be against her as a Catholic power. If France were a small or weak state in comparison with other Catholic states, and communion with Rome compelled her to adopt a policy which she regarded as contrary to her own political or social interests, she might have a pretext for breaking that communion; but such is not the case now, and is not likely to be the case hereafter. She has undeniably the leadership among Catholic powers, and, though she may force her policy upon them, they cannot force theirs upon her. Neither has the Emperor any thing to apprehend from the old system of public law and Catholic politics sustained by the Sovereign Pontiffs in past ages. He has not only emancipated himself, but also all Europe from that system. The Treaty of Paris, March, 1856, put an end to Christendom, and with it to all apprehension from Papal politics. The appeals of the Holy Father, backed by nearly all the bishops throughout the world, however they may touch Catholic hearts and move Catholic sympathies, bring no response from the political world. As to exterior politics, the Emperor, then, has nothing to gain by schism. France could only lose her Catholic prestige among Catholic powers, and the sympathies of all Catholics throughout the world, without acquiring any additional respect from non-Catholic powers. In the interior, the Emperor could hardly be more independent than he already is. With the Edict of Louis XIV. relative to the four articles of the French clergy, in 1682, which he has revived, and the lois organiques promulgated by his uncle along with the Concordat of 1801, which he refused, when Dictator, to repeal, he has nearly all the substantial power over the Church in France that he would have in case he were its acknowledged head. He has all the power over the Church in France that the old French kings had, and they, Fénelon tells us, "were more Popes in France than the Pope himself." He could hardly have more power to subject the Church to his will were he to adopt the policy of the pamphlet, while his re |