once it is proposed for our acceptance. We see in it the coping stone of the great spiritual edifice, which would be else in somewise unworthy of the Master Mind that designed it.

Our life or death insistence on distinctively Catholic teaching forming an integral part of the school curriculum of our children has always been a rock of scandal to those outside the Church, and at present perhaps more than ever, at least in England. But to one impregnated with the spirit of Catholicism, denominational teaching commends itself instinctively, and indeed to him any other attitude would appear suicide. For he will understand that we cannot lay an amorphous foundation that may suit anything or nothing, and then erect a jerry-built structure on it, in accordance with our own peculiar views. He knows by experience that from foundation to apex the edifice of our spiritual life, like the edifice of our Church: must be compact and homogeneous throughout; and that if religious education is anaemic and characterless in the beginning, it will remain so to the end, and can never become definite and characteristic and Catholic. This is plain enough to the experienced Catholicinstinct, but it is no matter for wonder that outsiders cannot understand the principle on which we object to have those doctrines that we hold in common with them, taught to our children in common with theirs.

In fact, I believe that Protestant hostility to some of our most cherished beliefs arises largely from the fact that they cannot be adequately appreciated except through experience.

I do not mean to contend that all the Catholic dogmas, like the ones I have considered, are guaranteed by our own experience, as well as by the divine authority, or that those I have specified have equal warrant in the experience of every one, but at the same time it is well to remember that if we have reason to believe in one characteristic tenet of a particular church, that that carries with it strong presumptive evidence of the truth of the other doctrines of the same Church as well.

I venture to think I have shown that our experience of the workings of God's grace in our souls, and our experience of the value of certain doctrines to our spirtual life, have a share with authority in convincing the intellect of religious truth and in moulding the heart to virtue.

The just man lives by faith; it is the beginning in us of the supernatural life, and we may also consider it as the soil in the garden of the soul, for it is the indispensable foundation of all virtue. But experience also has an important place, for in order to bring forth fruit in due season, the subsoil (human nature) must be nourished and refreshed by the living waters of divine grace.

Parteen, Limerick.

DAVID BARRY.

THE CURRENT SCIENCE-PHILOSOPHY

Francis P. Duffy, D. D.

It is now seventy years ago since Macaulay, writing on Lord Bacon in the Edinburgh Review, made the following comparison between the practical results of the old philosophy and the new science:

"Suppose that Justinian, when he closed the schools of Athens, had called on the last few sages who still haunted the Portico, and lingered round the ancient plane-trees, to show their title to public veneration; suppose that he had said: 'A thousand years have elapsed since, in this famous city, Socrates posed Protagoras and Hippias; during those thousand years a large proportion of the ablest men of every generation has been employed in constant efforts to bring to perfection the philosophy which you teach; that philosophy has been munificently patronized by the powerful, its professors have been held in the highest esteem by the public; it has drawn to itself almost all the sap and vigor of the human intellect; and what has it effected? What profitable truth has it taught + us which we should not equally have known without it? What has it enabled us to do which we should not have been equally-able to do without it?' Such questions, we suspect, would have puzzled Simplicius and Isidore. Ask a follower of Bacon what the new philosophy, as it was called in the time of Charles the Second, has effected for mankind, and his answer is ready: 'It has lengthened life; it has mitigated pain; it has extinguished diseases; it has increased the fertility of the soil, it has given new securities to the mariner; it has furnished new arms to the warrior; it has spanned great rivers and estuaries with bridges. of form unknown to our fathers; it has guided the thunderbolt innocuously from heaven to earth; it has lighted up the night with the splendor of the day; it has extended the range of the human vision; it has multiplied the power of the human muscles; it has accelerated motion; it has annihilated distance; it has facilitated intercourse, correspondence, all friendly offices, all despatch of business; it has enabled man to descend to the depths of the sea, to soar into the air, to penetrate securely into the noxious recesses of the earth, to traverse the land in cars which whirl along without horses, and the ocean in ships which run ten knots an hour against the wind. These are but a part of its fruits, and of its first fruits. For it is a philosophy which never rests, which has never attained, which is never perfect. Its law is progress. A point which yesterday was invisible is its goal to-day, and will be its starting-post to-morrow.""

Since these lines were written science has gone on working wonders which even the brilliant generalizations of Macaulay fail. to cover. Its triumphs have aroused the enthusiasm of the agewhich has witnessed them; they have been made the theme of its= orators and poets; they have become so common as to furnish stock

in trade for the humorist. Says the genial American philosopher, "Mr. Dooley," commenting on the Victorian age: An' th' invintions,-th' steam-injun an' th' printin'-press an' th' cotton-gin an' the gin sour an' th' bicycle an' th' flyin'-machine an' th' nickelin-th'-slot machine an' th' Croker machine an' th' sody fountain an’ -crownin' wur-rúk iv our civilization-th' cash raygisther. What gr-reat advances has science made in my time an' Victory's!"

They can scarcely be spoken of except in the form of the paradox. As a specimen of this I may quote from an article by Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee:

"The man who finds himself on a planet that is only lighted part of the time, is merely reminded that he must think of something. He digs light out of the ground and glows up the world with her own sap. When he finds himself living on an earth that can only be said to be properly heated a small fraction of the year, he makes the earth itself burn itself and keep him warm. Things like this are small to us. We take water and burn it into air and we telegraph boilers and we flash mills around the earth on poles. We move vast machines with a little throb, like light. We put a street on a wire. Great crowds in the great cities-whole blocks of them are handed along day and night like dots and dashes in telegrams. A man cannot be stopped by a breath. We save a man up in his own whisper hundreds of years when he is dead. A human voice that reaches only a few yards makes thousands of miles of copper talk. Then we make the thousand miles talk without the copper wire. We stand on the shore and beat the air with a thought thousands of miles away-make it whisper for us to ships."

If one were to attempt in more sericus mocd to fill up the lines of Macaulay's picture, he might say: Science has entered into every phase of human life: it has been pressed into the service of the family; it has lightened the work of the household, furnished and beautified the home, invented new methods and materials for the construction of the dwelling; it has irrigated, tilled and reaped the fields, making not only two blades of grass grow where one grew before, but evoking smiling harvests from the desert, and then carrying them to the populous centers of the world; it has invented countless methods for the utilization of products which formerly were lost to the use of mankind; it has delved into the bowels of the earth and laid their treasures at the feet of men; it has revolutionized medicine by making surgery possible and by abolishing diseases which were the scourge of the race; it has affected jurisprudence by inventing new methods for the detection of crime; it has modified most profoundly the relations between man and man by the facilities it has created for intercom

munication, opening new fields for the labors of the trader and the missionary, promoting the migration of nations to new lands, rendering possible the growth of cities; it has cut through continents, straightened rivers, leveled mountains; it has tamed the destructive. powers of electricity and explosives and has used them to destroy the barriers of space and time, until now the ether has been made a vehicle for speech which travels across thousands of miles at a speed almost equal to that of thought.

By its aid man has overcome the most dreaded powers of nature and has rendered himself independent of the more beneficent. It prophecies storms, it destroys pestilences, it makes habitable the waste places; it boldly essays to go down into the deeps in sub-marines, to ascend towards the firmament in airships, to overcome the powers of ice and snow and set the flag of civilization at the poles. It has made the mariner independent of the stars; it supplies warmth where the sun does not shine, and living waters where the rain never falls; it lights up the darkness of the night so that in great cities men forget the existence of the moon.

One can scarcely speak of its beneficent victories without employing language which has been consecrated to the uses of religion. It instructs the ignorant, heals the sick, feeds the hungry, clothes the naked. Like the prophet of old, it lays the mountains low and fills up the valleys and makes straight the paths of the world for the coming of-of whom?

All this would seem at first sight to be a glorious tribute to the achievements of modern science. But many a scientist would laugh it to scorn. Why, he would say, you are simply speaking of the menial occupations of science when she was the Cinderella of the sisterhood of knowledge, when she was content to scrub the floor and cook the food and run errands for the family. But it fails to estimate her position now. Her scornful sisters, philosophy and religion, are thrust out of doors and are wandering on wounded feet through the dark and waste places of the world while she sits enthroned dictating her lessons and laws to humanity.

That there is a large measure of truth in this view no well-informed person can deny. The achievements of science in the world of human service or utility which Macaulay contemplated, certainly form only the less striking part of its successes. The most magnificent results have been in the extension of the bounds of human knowledge. And here, though we must proceed more cautiously,