mount even to Himself. To stop man, then, on his march, to invite him to stand still by telling him :-Thou shalt go no further,'-is to violate his law, and to fall short of his destiny; it is an outrage against man and a disobedience towards God.

"But, observe carefully, the more legitimate the movement which impels man towards progress, the more important it becomes to give it a safe direction. The more holy that tendency, the more need has it of a divine light and rule to guide it on its way."pp. 18, 19.

For, as Father Felix goes on to observe, the greatest evils spring from the perversion of what is good in itself. Not only in the sacred name of liberty, but even under that of religion, have been committed the grossest crimes which stain the page of history; and the world is full of instances how that holy influence, the most divine which we possess, can be perverted to serve the cause of that which is worst and lowest in our nature. The aspiration after progress, more than all others, requires direction, because there is none in human nature which has more power. What is it which gives men strength to acquire greatness by heroic efforts, but the power of attraction onwards towards perfection?

"It is this which forms the illustrious artists, the immortal poets, the powerful orators, the heroic sanctities, in one word, the great man in every order of things; the man who has seen his ideal, and who exclaims when he looks at his own work, I can do better, I will mount higher.""-p. 24.

Who shall calculate the power and the force of this movement when it becomes universal? when not individuals alone, like Alexander, refuse ever to say, "Enough," but when all mankind unites in the cry of, "Advance; onward from Progress to Progress?" When men concentrate in such a movement the active energies of their life, the result must inevitably be a greatness allied to heavenly, or a ruin akin to that of the fallen angels; and which of these becomes the ultimate end depends on the path that is followed; this gigantic force which, assisted from above, may make man great, derives from the corruption of human nature additional and fearful power if employed in a downward direction;

"Facilis est descensus Averni!"

It was under the pretence of progress that the enemy deceived our first parents,-" Eat," he said, "and you

shall be as gods." It was because they swerved from the true path of progress which God had marked out for them, when He said, "Eat not," that they lost Paradise, and opened the doors to sin and death for all future time.

"Ah! Messieurs," exclaims the preacher, "when a people altogether under the fascination of progress, mistakes its true import, when it designates by this name all that is abasing and degrading, what must follow? That people will become dizzy, and will turn all its energy back against itself. All that it retains of greatness will conspire against its greatness; all that it retains of power will conspire to weaken it; and all its efforts to rise will only serve to render its fall the deeper."-p. 34.

Then, the very nature of things and the nature of man imperatively demand that a true direction be given to the aspirations of his heart after Progress. And it is especially required at the present moment when, more than in any preceding age, Progress is the ruling passion, the cry of the civilized world. In the 16th century the cry. was for reform, in the 18th for liberty; and nothing has yet been able to repair the disasters which followed from the mistaken interpretation of those words, so good in themselves, and from the false direction given to the movement they produced. We live in an age of discussion and division of opinion, but there is one idea which no one calls in question: "Progress is the idea of the age." If a party or a school would win the popular voice, it seeks to proclaim itself as the party or the school of Progress; and if it would decry its rivals, the term of reproach which rises to its lips, is Retrogrades! Progress is the passion of the age. It is the cry of rich and poor, of high and low, of prince and peasant, of England, of France, of the world. Men differ as to the mode of obtaining it, differ as to the question of what it consists in, but all unite in desiring it. And Progress is the will of the age. It is this will, this determination to advance in science, in wealth, in learning, that has produced a state of things which would make our fathers of but a century since astounded with the change, could they arise from their graves and witness the life, the perpetual motion, one may say, of the present day. Thus, as the character of an individual may be judged by that which forms his ruling idea, his guiding passion, and the leading object of his will, so may we affirm of the age in which we live, that its characteristic mark is Progress; Progress,

whether for good or for evil, according as the course it pursues be true or false. "En avant" is its idea, its passion, its will. But who is to bear the standard with this brave device? On this it turns whether the end be Excelsior or the reverse. God forbid any true man should set himself to oppose this idea, this passion, this will; but how is it to be guided aright, who is its true leader? We answer unhesitatingly, the Catholic Church, and none but she. She who belongs at once to the past and the present, and whose counsels, if heeded, would lead mankind in a direction ever onwards; there is no true progress without her, and with her there is no fear lest progress should be other than true, and sure, and glorious. Shallow minds of the age may regard her as belonging to the past alone; but no! in her we have the presence, we have the voice of Him who is for all time and for eternity, Jesus Christ yesterday, and to-day, and the same for ever.

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Glory be to God, and hope to men, there exists the true rule for progress: Christianity! The road to be followed opens out before you, mounting from earth to heaven; it is the path by which humanity, united to Jesus Christ, is called upon to advance from greatness to greatness, till it reaches the summit of every greatness. Christianity is the doctrine of Progress; Christianity is the law of Progress; Christianity is the history of Progress; Christianity is Progress itself. It is Jesus Christ living in man, Jesus Christ incorporating Himself with humanity, and incorporating humanity with Himself."-p. 59.

As, some eighteen centuries ago, St. Paul perceived in philosophical Athens an altar to the unknown God, holding its place among the idols of the city, so now in the midst of the pleasures, and the riches, and the science, which form the idols of our day, we find an unknown God to whom all pay homage, under the name of Progress. Like another St. Paul, the preacher must raise his voice to teach men that this Progress is to be found in Christ, and in Christ alone.

Before we arrive at the true doctrine and rule of progress, we must clearly understand its beginning and its end, its origin and its destiny; we must be able to answer those fundamental questions, "Whence come we? whither go we?" We will not follow the Père Félix through his masterly exposé of the utter inability of any system outside of Christianity to give a rational reply to them. The cloud of mystery in which the subject must ever be

shrouded, without the light of revelation, can only be dissipated by the Catholic doctrine of man created by the Almighty power of God, raised by Him to a supernatural state of grace, from which by an act of his own free will he fell; fell from this life divine, and entered on a downward course; thus came sin on himself and all his progeny, and though, through the unspeakable mercy of his Creator, a means of reparation was vouchsafed him, whereby he might follow his higher tendency to progress instead of his natural inclination to decline, yet that progress must be achieved by the sweat of his brow, by the hard earned conquest of himself and his evil propensities. This evil is in man; it is not merely in society, in institutions, in forms of government; reform these as you may, you will have done less than nothing till you reform man himself. Thus, nothing can be more false than to suppose that Progress consists in the free expansion of man's nature, of his instincts, of his passions, and that the beau idéal of society is that in which each individual may the most freely indulge them all without injury to his fellow-men, so that the only limit to this so-called liberty is to be respect for the same liberty in others. An idea as wild and absurd as it is anti-christian! God wills man's progress. Yes! But He wills it on the condition of man's efforts, and conquests over himself:-"The life of man upon earth is a warfare."

But it is a warfare in which he is not left unaided. The dogmas of the creation and the fall remain imperfect without the dogma of the Reparation. In the first Adam and Eve, and through their fall, all mankind tend to a downward course, which threatens their final ruin; but a new Adam and a new Eve have arrested them in their descent, and brought them a divine force, by the aid of which they may remount and still attain the destiny they had lost. The life of God in man, restored by Jesus Christ, this, and this alone, is the starting point for the true progress of the human race. And herein consists the essential difference between the Christian principle of Progress and the false spirit of the world, which looks upon Progress as a thing apart from Religion, and esteems it even a mark of Progress to treat all religions on an equality; as if

* Job vii. 1.

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true Progress could be obtained without the true religion. The world tells man to develope his powers as man, to advance himself by that development, to apply all his energies and to depend on those energies for the conquest of every obstacle to his self-aggrandizement, or to the aggrandizement of humanity as such, without reference to God. Christianity bids man to advance by self-annihilation ; human powers, human reason, human efforts are to be laid low and to die; and only to rise again when animated by the Spirit and the grace of God, through co-operation with which alone can man really advance:-"I live, now not I; but Christ liveth in me. Father Felix sums up this difference in the following passage :

"The rationalist believes in the Progress of the human race by the exclusive action of man; Christianity believes in the Progress of man by the action of God in our humanity. The one looks to the power of human reason for all intellectual progress of man; to the energy of the human will for all moral progress of man ; to the expansion of human fraternity for all social progress of man; to the power of human invention for all the material progress of man; in one word, it looks upon all Progress as beginning from man in order to end in the glorification of man. The other without making light of either reason, or will, or human fraternity, or material development, looks for the progress of the human intellect through the light of divine faith; the moral Progress of man through the power of divine grace; the social Progress of man through the fruitfulness of divine charity; it demands that material Progress should be directed and kept within bounds by Christian morality. In one word it looks upon all human Progress, guided by divine light and grace, as having its end in one supreme glorification of God......

"In short, false principles seek the Progress of man by means of man; the Christian seeks in Jesus Christ the Progress of man by means of God......

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Ah," cries the preacher, "if all those who demand of their own energy the secret of human Progress, were here, I would say to them, not in anger, but in love: You who seek not with us, there where it is to be found, the divine secret of Progress, I ask you to know yourselves, to examine yourselves, to judge yourselves. Say, find you yourselves strong enough to bind up all that is weak? exalted enough to raise up all that droops? enlightened enough to make clear all which is obscure? of a nature sufficiently perfect and progressive to expect from your own reason, your own power, your own genius, the Progress of the world and of yourselves? Do you think yourselves, in short, able by your own power to resolve this great enigma of the age?