individual souls, the natural world may be drawn. upon for help, and its elements put to use as instrumental means whereby that race shall be aided, in whose recovery nature herself has an interest and a direct concern. Here may be found a basis for the Sacramental System deeper than that of congruity, adaptation, or convenience. The employment of such a system is not to be regarded merely as a happy thought, a lucky hit, an appropriate idea, but it comes in because things are as they are, because nature is summed up in man; because all things work together for good to them that love God; because "the creature" itself is bound up in our fortunes, and may very fitly be employed in the process of our extrication from present evils. Such thoughts, if they prove to be true and in harmony with the Catholic faith, must place the subject beyond the reach of frivolous objection and lift it to the height which it seems, for some sufficient reason, to have held through all past ages of the Church.

Let us enter, with reverence and circumspection, a path rendered more attractive by the mysteries with which it is encompassed on the right hand and on the left. And, first, to speak of nature.

"

To him who, in the love of nature, holds

Communion with her visible forms, she speaks

A various language."

So sings a poet of our own land. But what, after all our study, do we know of nature? What is meant by the word? And what progress has been made in interpreting her secrets? There are two great heresies relating to the natural world; one cuts it off from Almighty God, the other confounds it substantially with Him. To some nature is a vast, godless phenomenon, the outcome of a blind movement, directed by no intelligent ruler or governor. Such persons make it a stupendous fetich; they ascribe to it personality, they talk of nature's laws and nature's designs and nature's acts as if nature were as God to us. In their anxious interest men have run into innumerable conjectures. The Manichean says that matter is essentially evil; the gnostic conceives of the natural world as the work of a malevolent demiurge, the rival and ancient foe of God. To some, as they speculate on the universe, its existence appears a necessity; God is constrained to be always a creator; He can never have been without a manifestation exterior to Himself. To the pantheist, nature and God are the same-one universal and all-per

vading substance; nature is God taking form and shape; God evolving and developing; God sleeping in the rock, moving in the lower creation, coming to thought and self-knowledge in man. The transcendentalist runs into unintelligible talk, telling us that "Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas; that the world is mind precipitated, and that the volatile essence is forever escaping again into the state of free thought."* Such are instances of the efforts of man to get at the secret of "the rounded world, nine times folded in mystery." But a Catholic Christian is protected by his faith from such erroneous and wild opinions; he does not know all; he does not pretend to know much; but he knows something, and what he knows is worth knowing. To him nature is not a self-existing phenomenon, nor the result of chance, nor yet

"A hollow form with empty hands."

In the creed of the Catholic Church he has light on this subject; that light comes in the sublime declaration of the existence of "One God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible;" it comes in the

further statement that God, having created the heavens and the earth, "saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good."* Here, at all events, are starting-points; lines on which to move with some confidence in our study of the mystery; first principles to save us from the blank hollowness of intuitive religionism and the unintelligible utterances of the ideal philosopher. Even the materialist renders us a not unimportant service at this point of our studies. Of dogmatic materialism it has been well said, that

"It is the twin brother of atheism. It may well be called the gospel of the flesh; it is the absolute deification of matter and of the creature. The materialists are the most dangerous enemies of progress that the world has ever seen.Ӡ

The charge is true of materialism, as a philosophic system pretending to explain all, and to account for man in his entire state. But materialism has its uses and serves a good purpose to the Catholic faith. As Dr. Liddon remarks:

“Materialism has done valuable service in correcting the exaggeration of a one-sided spiritualism. It is common but erroneous to speak of man's body as being related to his

* Gen. i. 31.

Christlieb, "Modern Doubt and Christian Belief," Lecture III. ii.

spirit only as is the casket to the jewel which it contains. But, as a matter of fact, the personal spirit of man strikes its roots far and deep into the encompassing frame of sense, with which, from the first moment of its existence, it has been so intimately associated. The spirit can indeed exist independently of the body, but this independent existence is not its emancipation from a prison-house of matter and sense, it is a temporary and abnormal divorce from the companion whose presence is needed to complete its life.”

The mystery of creation is not to be solved by the materialist, the pantheist, the transcendentalist, or the ideal philosopher. In their methods they confuse matter and mind; they sacrifice the flesh. to the spirit or the spirit to the flesh; they confound the Creator and the creature; they let go the real to chase a phantom; they deny the evidence · of the senses or the facts of human experience. There is no escape from their errors save in the acceptance of these cardinal principles of Catholic doctrine:

(a) That God alone is uncreate and eternal.

(b) That He made all things by the word of His power, not of His own substance, but of elements created by Him for their purpose.

(c) That He made all things good. (d) That He rules and governs all.

These statements constitute the formal contradic