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the changed position of Catholics in the United States from what it was when the good Dr. Carroll was consecrated the first Bishop of Baltimore. Then little could be contemplated by the Bishop or his Clergy but the simple preservation of the faith, and ministration to the spiritual wants of the few Catholics then in the country; then the chief duty evidently was to keep Catholics Catholic, and to give them the Sacraments, and wait for time to soften prejudice and conciliate opposition; no great impulse could be given, or be expected to be given, to the work of conversion, and very little thought was necessary to be given to the social position and action of Catholics, save so far as necessary to prevent them from committing the Church to one political party or another, or exciting the hostility of non-Catholics against them.

But since then great changes have taken place. Catholics by natural increase, by immigration, and by conversion, have increased from thousands to millions, and we are now numerically a very considerable portion of the American population, for we number more communicants than any one Protestant Denomination amongst us. Our position has changed; our wants have changed; and, in some respects, our duties have changed. Our duty is not now merely to keep our people quiet in the faith, and protect them from the attacks of non-Catholics, but to endeavor to extend our faith, to convert unbelievers and misbelievers, and to Catholicize the country. Our Clergy are not now merely chaplains to a foreign immigration or an isolated colony, but belong to a Hierarchy which embraces the nation, and hold the position, have the duties, and, we say it with all reverence, should have the aspirations of a national Clergy, in the good, not the exclusive sense of that term. They have now imposed upon them the great work of bringing this whole country into the bosom of the Catholic Church, so that our Bishops shall be recognized as Bishops, and submitted to as such, by the whole population of their respect ive Sees. The work, then, which the Clergy have to do for religion at the present time in this country, seems to us twofold: first, to administer to the spiritual wants of those already within the fold, and, second, to labor to prevent the loss of educated, intelligent, and aspiring sons of Catholic parents, and to recover to the faith those who are now in heresy or infidelity.

It is only in this latter work that a Catholic publicist, as

such, can perform any important part, or be an auxiliary of the Clergy. If he is to render any essential service in the performance of this work, the Clergy, we have maintained, and still maintain, must allow him to deal frankly and freely with the great practical questions which are uppermost in the minds of these two classes of our countrymen, and to meet the various objections in their minds alike to Catholic doctrine and practice, and to the opinions and practices of Catholics, whether these objections are theological or philosophical, political or moral. To understand and answer these objections does not necessarily demand the Sacrament of Orders; and so long as the publicist keeps within the limits of faith and sound doctrine, there should be, in our judgment, no interference with his freedom, though he should treat many questions which, if we looked only to the peace and quiet of the simple and illiterate among Catholics, it would be far better not to agitate at all.

Such are the views which we have entertained of our rights and duties as a Catholic publicist, and we have supposed we could entertain and act on such views without going beyond our province as a layman, or showing any want of reverence for the sacerdotal character and office. That we have done our part in the work well, or with any degree of success, we do not pretend; nobody is, or can be, more aware of our short-comings and of our failure to realize in execution our own ideal, than we are. To have done our part in this work as we conceive it should be done, would require qualities, an ability, and philosophical and theological attainments to which we lay no claim. We have done, however, what we could, and being what we are and are likely to remain as long as we live, in the best way we could. We have never felt ourselves competent to solve all the questions raised by the age; but we have felt the importance of the questions themselves and the necessity of meeting them. The most that we have done, for it is the most we were able to do, has been to call attention to them, to fix the mind of intelligent Catholics on them, and to make some suggestions, perhaps not useless, in the attempt to solve them. No doubt there are hundreds and thousands amongst us able to do the work far better than we have done it; and, if we have had the presumption to engage ourselves in it, it has not been through any overweening confidence in our learning and ability, of which we think very lightly,

but because we saw here in our own country no others engaged in it, who seemed likely to do it any better than we could. Here are our answers to the various objections brought by our theological friend and other critics against our course as a Catholic Reviewer. It is for others to judge whether these answers are satisfactory or not, and to acquit or condemn us as they see proper.

ART. II. Della Filosofia della Rivelazione di VINCENZO GIOBERTI. Pubblicata per Cura di GIUSEPPE MASSARI. Turin and Paris, 1856.

A WESTERN editor, who has little occasion to put up the Scotchman's prayer, "O Laird! gie us a gude conceit o' oursels," attempts to be witty and merry over our advocacy of the synthetic method in our last Review; and others have been at some loss to understand what is the precise difference between the synthetic and analytic methods we recognize. To our merry critic we probably have no answer to give that would be intelligible; to the others who ask rather than seek to give information, and who experience a real difficulty on the subject, we may reply that analysis considers a subject in its several parts and these several parts abstractedly or as isolated, while synthesis considers the subject as a whole and the several parts in their relation to the whole or as integrated in it. In all philosophizing, as in all reasoning, there must be both analysis and synthesis; and we do not understand, and never have understood by the synthetic method the exclusion of analysis. In the synthetic method synthesis predominates and controls the analysis; in the analytic method analysis predominates and controls the synthesis. In the synthetic method we use analysis to find the synthesis; in the analytic method we use analysis in order to construct a synthesis.

We call the Scholastic method the analytic method, not because it does not aim at a synthesis, but because it aims at a logical synthesis, which is a mere abstract synthesis, not at the real synthesis of things. It constructs, it does not find a synthesis; and hence its synthesis is not a real synthesis but a simple sum or summary. By it we attain

to abstract conceptions, we see or study truth in detail, in its separate or detached parts, not in its real relations as a living and organic whole. There is, we should be sorry to question, back of the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas a real, a living synthesis, as there is back of all the definitions of the Church the living synthesis proceeding from the creative act of God and revealed by the Gospel, in which every definition of the Church, every special doctrine of the Summa is integral, and may be seen to be so by an intellect capable of taking in the whole, and every part in its real relation to the whole; but this real and living synthesis is not continually kept in view, is not clearly and distinctly brought out, and by ordinary minds is nei ther discovered nor suspected; each proposition stands, as it were, alone, as an independent proposition, not as a part bearing a relation to the whole, and having its truth and significance only in that relation. All minds of the first order are synthetic, and comprehend the parts in their relation to the whole, while minds of the second, or an inferior order are analytic, and are capable of comprehending the whole only in its parts, and lose themselves in particulars. Hence it is that our later philosophers and theologians who.profess to follow the mediæval masters give us in either theology or philosophy at best only a summary of particulars united by no common bond, integrated in no common principle that unites and vivifies the whole; hence modern official philosophy is a hortus siccus, and theology a caput mortuum, or rather a cabinet of specimens, where each specimen is properly labeled and numbered. To be a first-class philosopher or a first-class theologian now-a-days demands only a good memory, or readiness in reading or deciphering the labels and numbers.

Synthesis, rightly understood, is not something we attain to or construct by our logical analyses, but is the real relation in which things actually exist, and to find it, we must study things as they really are, and see them in their real relation to their first cause and to their final cause. In following the synthetic method we start from the original synthesis of things, intuitively given, and which is the basis. of all the real as of all the knowable, and study to bring back to this synthesis and integrate in it the several particular things we observe and analyze, for these things have no meaning, no reality even, out of this synthesis, or, if you prefer it, their synthetic relation. Thus, if you dissolve

the synthesis and take either of its terms as isolated, you attain not to truth, but either to pantheism or to nullism. The creative act is a nullity if isolated from Ens or Being whose act it is, as creatures or existences are nullities if isolated from the creative act on which they are absolutely dependent. Dissolve the synthesis and take the first term, Being, and proceed analytically from the idea of Being to the idea of creation, and the only idea of creation you can attain to is that of a necessary creation, or the pantheism of Cousin, because analytic judgments merely bring out the contents of the subject analyzed, and in them subject and predicate are identical, and the predicate adds nothing to the subject. If the subject is real, necessary, and eternal Being, creation, as analytically deducible therefrom, must be itself real, eternal, and necessary Being, and therefore no creation at all; God and the universe would be identical. Exclude the subject and proceed to deduce the idea of Creator from the simple analysis of existence, you would equally fail to attain to the idea of God, since, as we have said, analytic judgments add no predicate to the subject, and can bring out only what is already contained in it, though before analysis not apprehended.

The illusion of our philosophers and some of our theolo gians on this point is in the fact that they unconsciously in analyzing existence or the contingent, do recognize and assert the necessary and real as creating it. The contingent is dependent and therefore cannot stand alone on its own basis, and is inconceivable without that which is not contingent on which it depends for existence. In itself, isolated from God, it is simply nothing. The analysis of nothing gives nothing; from nothing, nothing comes. Therefore analysis of the simple idea of existence, or existence by itself alone, conducts directly and immediately to nullism. Here are the two rocks on which modern philosophy splits. German philosophy, starting from Being, or what it calls the Absolute, remains forever in Being or the Absolute, and can never assert the contingent or relative. Cartesianism, or the prevailing French philosophy, starting from personal existence, or the contingent, remains forever in it, and can never get beyond subjectivism, to the assertion of real and necessary Being, that is to say, is doomed to end in simple nihilism. This too was the case with all ancient Pagan philosophy, for that dissolved the original synthesis by leaving out the copula, and turned forever in the sub

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