teaches as his word, can be as conclusively proved as the competency and credibility of a witness in any case in court whatever. She was an eye and ear-witness of the life, works, death, and resurrection of our Lord, who is at once perfect God and perfect man; she received the divine word directly from him, and is the contemporary and living witness of what he taught and commanded. The church has never for a moment ceased to exist, but has continued from Christ to us as one identical living body that suffers no decay and knows no succession of years; with her nothing has been forgotten, for nothing has fallen into the past. The whole revelation of God is continually present to her mind and heart. She is, then, a competent witness; for she knows all the facts to which she is required to testify. She is a credible witness; for God himself has appointed, commissioned, authorized her to bear witness for him to all nations and ages, even unto the consummation of the world, and has promised to be with her, and to send to her assistance the Paraclete, the Spirit of Truth, who should recall to her mind whatsoever he had taught her, and lead her into all truth. The divine commission or authorization to teach carries with it the pledge of infallibility in teaching; for God cannot be the accomplice of a false teacher, or one who is even liable to err. What surrender is there of one's reason, judgment, free-will, manhood, in believing the testimony of a competent and credible witness?

In point of fact, the case is even stronger than we put it. The church is the body of Christ, and in her dwelleth the Holy Ghost. She is human in her members, no doubt; but she is divine as well as human in her head. The human and divine natures, though for ever distinct, are united in one divine person by the hypostatic union. This one divine Person, the Word that was made flesh, or assumed flesh, for our redemption and glorification, is the person of the church, who through him lives a divine as well as a human life. It is God who speaks in her voice as it was God who spoke in the voice of the Son of Mary, that died on the cross, that rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven, whence he shall come again to judge the quick and the dead. Hence, we have not only the word of God as the authority for believing his revelation, but his authority in the witness to the fact that it is his revelation or his word that we believe. We may even go further still, and state that the Holy Ghost beareth witness within us with our spirits in concurrence with the external witness to the same fact, so that it may be strengthened by the mouth of two witnesses. More ample means of attesting the truth and leaving the unbeliever without excuse are not possible in the nature of things.

It is not, then, the Catholic who contradicts himself; for between the free exercise of reason and complete submission to the authority of the church, as both are understood by Catholics, there is no contradiction, no contrariety even. Faith, by the fact that it is faith, differs necessarily from science. It is not intuitive or discursive knowledge, but simply analogical knowledge. But reason in itself cannot go beyond what is intuitively apprehended, or discursively obtained, that is, obtained from intuitive data either by way of deduction or induction. In either case, what is apprehended or obtained is knowledge, not belief or faith. To believe and to know are not one and the same thing; and whatever reason by itself can judge of comes under the head of science, not faith; whence it follows that reason can never judge of the intrinsic truth or falsehood of the matter of faith; for if it could, faith would be sight, and in no sense faith. If we recognize such a thing as faith at all, we must recognize something which transcends or does not fall under the direct cognizance of reason; and therefore that which reason does not know, and can affirm only as accredited by some authority distinct from reason. The Catholic asserts faith on authority, certainly, but on an authority which reason herself holds to be sufficient. True, he does not submit the question of its truth or falsehood to the judgment of reason; for that would imply a contradiction—that faith is not faith, but sight or knowledge. This is the mistake of sectarians and rationalists, who deny authority in matters of faith. They practically deny reason, by demanding of it what exceeds its powers; and faith, by insisting on submitting it to the judgment of reason, and denying that we have or can have any reason for believing what transcends reason. It ill becomes them, therefore, to accuse Catholics of contradicting themselves, when they assert the rights of reason in its own order, and the necessity of authority in matters of faith, or matters that transcend reason. They themselves, according to their own principles, have, and can have no authority for believing; and therefore, if they believe at all, they do and must believe without reason; and belief without reason is simple fancy, caprice, whim, prejudice, opinion, not faith.

But the Christian Quarterly is not alone in imagining a contradiction between reason and authority. The whole modern mind assumes it, and imagines a contradiction wherever it finds two extremes, or two opposites. It has lost the middle term that brings them together and unites them in a logical synthesis. To it, natural and supernatural, nature and grace, reason and faith, science and revelation, liberty and authority, church and state, heaven and earth, God and man—are irreconciliable extremes; and not two extremes only, but downright contradictions, which necessarily exclude each other. It does not, even if it accepts both terms, accept them as reconciled, or united as two parts of one whole; but each as exclusive, and warring against the other, and each doing its best to destroy the other.

Hence the modern mind is, so to speak, bisected by a painful dualism, which weakens its power, lowers its character, and destroys the unity and efficiency of intellectual life. We meet every day men who, on one side, assert supernatural faith, revelation, grace, authority, and, on the other, pure naturalism, which excludes every thing supernatural or divine. On the one side of their intelligence, nothing but God and grace, and on the other, nothing but man and nature. Indeed, the contradiction runs through nearly the whole modern intellectual world, and is not encountered among the heterodox only. We find even men who mean to be orthodox, think they are orthodox, and are sincerely devoted to the interests of religion, who yet see no real or logical connection between their faith as Catholics and their principles as statesmen, or their theories as scientists.

The two terms, or series of terms, of course, must be accepted, and neither can be denied without equally denying the other. The objection is not that both are asserted, but that they are asserted as contradictories; for no contradiction in the real world, which is the world of truth, is admissible. The Creator of the world is the Logos, is logic in itself, and therefore, as the Scripture saith, makes all things by number, weight, and measure. All his works are dialectic, and form a self-consistent whole; for, as St. Thomas says, he is the type of all things—Deus est similitudo rerum omnium. There must then be, somewhere, the mediator, or middle term which unites the two extremes, and in which their apparent contradiction is lost, and they are opposed only as two parts of one uniform whole. The defect of the modern mind is that it has lost this middle term, and men retain in their life the dualism we have pointed out, because they do not see that the conflicting elements are not harmonizable in their intelligence; or, because they have lost the conception of reality, and are false to the true principle of things.

In the early ages of the church, the fathers had no occasion to take care that