loving and serving the creature. It is philosophical, indeed, but practical rather than speculative, and moral rather than metaphysical. We complain not of this in itself, but the author does not avow it, or seem to be fully aware of it. He seems to proceed on the assumption, that both objects are to be effected by the same process, and to regard his work as fitted alike for both speculative and practical atheists. He would have us believe that he is writing a purely metaphysical work, demonstrating and elucidating the first principles of all science, as well as inciting to growth in the knowledge and love of God. There is, therefore, to us some discrepancy, in his work, between what he really does and what he has the air of doing, or of supposing that he is doing.

We think M. Gratry makes a mistake in regarding metaphysics and theodicy as precisely one and the same thing. We cannot for ourselves consent to resolve ontology into theodicy, for we believe that in our intuition God is presented as the object of the intellect prior to his being presented as the object of the will, and therefore as the summum Ens or Verum before he is presented as summum Bonum, or as the True before being presented as the Good. We have duly considered what the author says to the contrary, but it does not convince us that the heart darts away to God as the object of its love or its beatitude before he is presented as the object of the intellect. The heart has its movements, its affections, and these may urge the soul to action, yet without the light of the intellect they are mere blind cravings, torment the soul, and render it restless and incapable of repose; but they are all interior, and can fasten upon this object only as intellectually apprehended. The age experiences these cravings, and is crying out day and night for some object on which to fasten, and which shall be adequate to its wants and fill its empty heart. Hence the universal unrest which is its grand characteristic. It craves it knows not what. The intellect does not present the object that could satisfy its vague longings, and in which its heart can find repose. Its malady is moral, but also intellectual. The author, undoubtedly, wishes to render his philosophy living and practical, adequate to the wants of the heart as well as to those of the understanding. He wishes to give fair and full play to the moral feelings. He thinks they ought to count for more

than they do in our modern scholastic philosophy; that there is a logic of the heart which is, perhaps, superior to that of the head, and he endeavors to prove that we first know God as the good, first apprehend him in his moral attributes. If we understand him, the intellect apprehends God as the True because the heart has already apprehended him as the Good and the Beautiful. Hence he resolves, virtually, philosophy into ethics, and makes its first division theodicy. But the soul, though endowed with several faculties, is a simple spiritual substance. It has the power to know, to will, and to feel, but it cannot act as the one power without also acting in some degree as the other. It has no cognitions without volitions and emotions, no volitions or emotions without cognitions. It acts never as three distinct activities, but as a simple vis activa with a threefold capacity of acting. Now suppose the heart apprehends God before he is apprehended by the head, must it not still apprehend him intellectually? If the heart, that is, the power either to will or to feel, taken distinctively, is blind, it cannot apprehend anything. Has it then some other light or medium of placing itself in relation with its object than the intellect? M. Gratry, indeed, speaks of a "divine sense," a "divine instinct," by which the soul is drawn to and placed in relation with God as the Good, as the adequate object of its love; but is this divine sense or instinct intelligent? does it present its object to the soul's contemplation? How then distinguish it from reason or intellect? If it is not, how say that by it the heart knows God? If it is not intellect, it must be will or feeling, and if simple will or feeling, it is in itself blind, and has no light to know except from the intellectual faculty itself; for to know is one and the same phenomenon, whatever its conditions, its region, or its degrees.

We confess that we distrust this talk about a divine sense, or divine instinct, which is supposed to be distinguishable from our common intellectual faculty; and when we find an author placing in the acquisition of knowledge the heart above the head, we are tempted to suspect that he does not himself very well understand what he is about. We very readily concede that the end is not simply to know, and that all knowledge should be in order to love or charity; and in this sense we place the heart above the

head. But the heart taken distinctively for the affections or emotions is not a light, is but a blind craving to love, or aspiration to our Supreme Good, which it sees not, and finds not by any light of its own. The heart craves beatitude, and torments itself till it finds it; and from this we may learn that it wants what it has not, and may conclude, if we already believe that a good God has made us, that there is a beatitude for us, and which we may attain unless we have forfeited it by our fault; but the heart itself, regarded as unenlightened by natural or supernatural intelligence, cannot tell where its beatitude is to be found, or in what it consists. Its supposed divine sense or instinct is in reality intellectual intuition, or an obscure perception of God as the Supreme Good, as St. Thomas teaches when he says. the soul has an obscure apprehension of God in its desire for beatitude, which is to be found only in God.

We are ourselves supposed to have no heart, and are regarded as a mere logic-grinder, logic-chopper, or dialectic gladiator; and therefore our inability to accept M. Gratry's doctrine will most likely be ascribed to our own psychological defects. But be this as it may, we can understand very well the cravings of the heart, its deep power of love. We know very well that man is not all dry intellect. We can imagine that he has a heart, and that this heart craves beatitude, nay, that its deepest want is to love, and that all love seeks to lose itself in the beloved. We can very well understand that God is the only adequate object of the heart, and that he only can satisfy its love. The heart was made for God, and nothing less than blessed union with him, the full possession of him as the beloved, can fill it, give it fulness of joy, and sweet repose. Here we should be sorry not to be able to go all lengths with the Christian mystic; but it is through the understanding, by natural and supernatural light, that God as the adequate object of the heart, or as our Supreme Good, is presented to the soul. Without this light presenting the object, the heart's love fastens upon nothing, or fastens upon low and unworthy objects, which serve only to disappoint or to disgust it. God, then, as the adequate object of the heart, must be presented as the adequate object of the intellect, as the summum Verum, prior to being apprehended as the summum Bonum; and therefore metaphysics should precede in our philosophy theodicy, as it does with

3

nearly all our theologians. We prize Plato very highly, as we have always said, but we do not think him always a safe guide. It is worthy of remark, that all the mystagogues of the Middle Ages were Platonists, and setting up Plato against Aristotle was the signal of rebellion against the Church, which has resulted in modern Protestantism. Plato is the favorite author of our Transcendentalists, and was the philosopher of predilection of the Patarins, Cathares, or Albigenses, and the followers of the Gospel of Love, so widely asserted in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, against the Papacy and Catholic theology. We cannot think that this is purely accidental. Plato, though he mitigates the Oriental doctrine that matter is evil and the source of evil, still holds it, and teaches that we attain to a knowledge of God and divine things only in proportion as we trample on the body. We must despise it, and practically disengage ourselves from it, and rise on the wings of pure spiritual contemplation and love into intimate union with God. This is a satanic imitation of the Christian doctrine of charity and mortification; and so close is the resemblance, that it deceives not a few, and never was there an age in a more fitting temper to be deceived by it than our own. Christianity does not place the origin of evil in matter, nor regard matter either as evil or unclean; for it teaches the resurrection of the flesh, honored by its assumption in the womb of the Virgin by the Son of God. It sees evil only in sin, and sin only in the perverse will, or abuse of our moral freedom. Its works of mortification are not performed in hatred of the body, nor to release the soul from it, but in honor of the sufferings of our Lord in the flesh, and in purification of the soul from its own fleshly desires; for these desires are not, as with the Platonists, the desires of a sensual soul distinct from the spiritual soul, but are desires of the spiritual soul itself united to the flesh. By mortification the Christian purifies his soul and sanctifies the body, and keeps it holy as the temple of the Holy Ghost. He rules the body, but loves and cherishes it. The Platonist contemns it, and seeks to act as a spirit without a body. He falls back on the spirit, which in his view is separated from God only by the body or material envelope. He regards his purity and holiness as independent of the body, as dependent solely on that higher, or, as Plato calls it, demonic region of the soul, in

which it is still united, or attached perhaps substantially, to the Divinity, and therefore treats what concerns the body as wholly unconnected with the moral state or character of the soul. Hence the lawlessness and irregularities of the body, its wild disorders and debaucheries, have nothing to do with the soul's purity and holiness. They belong, as it were, to another person, and no more defile the soul than the filth on which it shines defiles the sun's ray. Hence the Patarins or Cathares, while claiming the greatest spiritual purity, abandoned themselves to the grossest sensual indulgences, and practised such abominations, that the Church, in order to save Christian morals and prevent the dissolution of society, was obliged to proclaim a crusade against them, and to call upon the secular princes to exterminate them, as we shall have yet to do with our Mormons.

The doctrine of Plato, that we attain to a knowledge of God by love, is also liable to a gross abuse, as we see in the same heretics. Who has not heard of the old minstrels, Troubadours, and Trouvères? Their Their songs, ballads, lays, sirventes, fabliaux, seem to us in these days mere songs in honor of the poet's lady-love; but the love they sang, at least they who sang in Provençal and Italian, is the heretical Love of the Cathares and other sects. The Beatrice of Dante and the Laura of Petrarca only symbolize the Gospel of Love, the Johannine Gospel as distinguished from the Pétrine and Pauline Gospels, so boldly proclaimed by Schelling a few years since at Berlin, defended formerly, we are ashamed to say, by us, and still by Chevalier Bunsen, as the basis of the Church of the Future. The doctrine is, that the Church is progressive, at first authoritative with Peter, then intellectual with Paul, and now is to be love with John. In the thirteenth century this doctrine was widely diffused, and was cherished and defended by secret societies all over Europe, especially in Northern Italy and Southern France. The sect held that love alone was required, and that authority and dogmas were not only superfluous, but absolutely repugnant to the spirit of true Christianity. This love, the Platonic love, is the love that was sung by the Provençal and Ghibbeline poets, whose real purpose was to corrupt the people, to detach them from the Holy See, and to carry on the wars of the Emperors and secular princes against the Papacy. The