Leo XIII. closes his Encyclicals with appeals to the Virgin Mary, St. Joseph and other Saints for intercession with God,-but he rarely, if ever, appeals Christ as the Great Intercessor, although we have His express promise that whatsoever we should ask in His name we shall receive. (Gospel of St. John XVI., 24.)

Need we wonder that in a religion which recognizes in man only a rational soul, (as it does in plants a vegetable soul and in animals a sensitive soul,) the divine lineaments of the Saviour are fading away, as it were, in a dissolving view, to be replaced by the sharp, cold features of "the Philosopher," and that the Holy Spirit comes only-as was said at the Council of Trent-in the mail-bags from the Vatican, and that even the worship of God the Father is being reduced to a faint Deism by the hero-worship of a crowd of dei minores? What chance has the patient when the physician not only ignores the only possible remedy but even denies the existence of the one organ through which the remedy could be taken into the system?

Why should we be surprised at the slow progress of Christianity under Roman Catholic guidance any more than we should wonder at the slow progress of an ocean steamship, whose captain was ignorant of, or denied the existence of the great engine beneath his deck, and insisted on propelling his ship only by the methods and rules, in vogue three hundred years before the Day of Pentecost?

The Church herself, through the exaltation of reason and the degradation of conscience, has raised

レ

that mighty brood of Rationalists or Naturalists, such as Grotius, Hobbes, Puffendorf and Rousseau, who now threaten to devour her; see the chapter on the history of the Social Contract Theory, in the author's "Trade Organizations in Politics."

Was it not natural that when the forged bands of the False Decretals, which bound St. Thomas, and, as he thought, all human reason to the Chair of St. Peter, were proven by history to be but shams and illusions that man should fall back to the position of Aristotle, with reason, deprived of all divine aid, as his only guide?

In vain would the Church hand over all such Naturalists or Rationalists "to the secular arm"! There is but one remedy: Let it assist in replacing conscience on the throne of human nature, but prostrate, with imploring arms, without any human intermediary, at the foot-stool of God, the Holy Ghost.

As Maurice says in "The Conscience," p. 83:

"There is that in me which asks for the Right, for that which ought to have dominion over me; there is that in me which says emphatically, 'This is not that Right, this ought not to have dominion over me!' I may be long in learning what the Right is; I make a thousand confused efforts to grasp it; may I may try to make it for myself; I may let others make it for me. But always there will be a witness in me that what I have made or anyone has made, is not what I ought to serve; that is not the right, not what I am seeking for, not what is seeking me."

CHAPTER V.

THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE.

Leo XIII., in his Encyclical on St. Thomas Aquinas, above cited, declares: "So, too, the physical sciences, so much in vogue now, and which by their ingeniously contrived inventions have everywhere excited so much merited attention, will have not only nothing to lose, but much to gain by the restoration of the ancient philosophy. For in their use and improvement, the mere consideration of facts and study of nature is not enough; but after the facts are established, it is needful to go a step higher, and sedulously employ every means in finding out the nature of corporeal things, investigating the laws and principles by which they are governed, and by tracing up their system, their unity and variety, and their mutual affinity in diversity. To all these investigations scholastic philosophy, if handled with skillfulness, will bring power and light and empire-we most earnestly beseech you, venerable brethren, to restore and extend far and wide the golden wisdom of St. Thomas for the improvement of all the sciences."

What is "the golden wisdom" of St. Thomas as to the physical world?

The importance of this question will at once be recognized when we remember that one merit of scholastic philosophy which no one can dispute, is the

logical unity and consistency with which it proceeds from the most fundamental principles of metaphysics to the most practical acts of every day life; and moreover that one of the most important teachings of the Roman Church, the doctrine of transubstantiation, is bound up with and depends upon its well defined, closely argued theory of the physical world.

It is submitted that the so-called science of astrology formed an essential part of the theory of St. Thomas, as to the constitution of the physical world, and that with the elimination of that belief the mainspring of his entire cosmic theory was removed and the fragmentary remains of the system are unintelligible, and tend only to clog the progress of true science.

To prove this assertion it is necessary only to consider the following citations from the second largest work of St. Thomas, known as the Contra Gentiles or Summa Philosophica, in which the Angelic Doctor sets forth his philosophical system, as he did afterwards his theology in the Summa Theologiae.

In brief, following Aristotle, his theory is that everything in the world, except to a certain extent the soul of man, receives its original motive power (¿. e., its substantial form), by which it exists as such or such a being, from the stars, and that each of the stars is in turn guided by an intelligent spirit (not an angel); so that the whole creation is a hierarchy working together for the glory of God. It follows that if this motive power from the stars does not exist, the whole system falls to pieces, and the terms such as substance" and "accident" are as useless

and worthless as the wheels and levers of a perpetual motion machine; a chain is no stronger than its weakest link!

St. Thomas could as little imagine the physical world without this hierarchical system as he could imagine the Church with an organization as simple as that of the Society of Friends, or the State, as a democracy with universal suffrage; and to endeavor, therefore, to force modern science to adapt itself to the terms and requirements of scholastic philosophy is as sensible as it would be to educate the future citizens of a republic, with universal suffrage, on the precepts of some writer on Feudal Law.

In fact, the fall of the Feudal System as well as that of the hierarchical medieval Church is closely connected with the discrediting of astrology; it is, therefore, easy to understand the hate of the Church against Galileo, and how Descartes trembled at publishing his theories of the heavenly bodies even as an hypothesis. Only when this baneful influence was removed, could a man stand up and say: "Cogito, ergo sum."

The following quotations from the third book of St. Thomas's Contra Gentiles will, it is believed, justify the foregoing assertions, even to persons who have not made a study of scholasticism, and to whom, therefore, many of the terms will seem strange. The quotations are given somewhat in full because the book "Contra Gentiles" is not generally attainable.

Chapter XXII.: "The celestial bodies truly move and are moved. . . . in so far as they move by moving,