href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@38391@[email protected]#CHAPTER_IX" class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">CHAPTER IX.
THE CRISIS IN PORTUGAL.

Old Glories of Portugal— Pombal the Infamous— Portugal and Napoleon— English Influence— Dom Pedro— Maria da Gloria and Dom Miguel— The Revolution of 1833— The Present Time— Assassination of Carlos I.— Revolution Always Active— The Young King a Victim of Conspirators— The Revolution of 1910— Violence Against the Religious and the Clergy Generally— Letter of the Jesuit Provincial— Spoliation— Treatment of the Prisoners— Outlawed and Exiled— The Charges and Their Answers— Armaments and Subterranean Galleries— Alleged Wealth of the Jesuits— Another Charge— Alleged Secret Association— Charge of Political Activity— Reactionary Influence

Introduction.

If it is true that a nation is what its doctrines are, it becomes very easy to discover in the doctrines of contemporary Europe the last reason of the troubles and revolutions which keep it in constant turmoil. It has sowed the wind, now it is reaping the whirlwind. It has destroyed the foundations, and it is but natural that the edifice should begin to fall to its ruin.

The English Socinians, followed by Voltaire, uprooted the Christian idea, and Rousseau after denying the true nature of God, set up the worship of man in His place. From these ancestors was born a generation of rationalists and atheists, who celebrated their triumphs, first in the French Revolution, and afterwards in the general dissolution of organized society. Out of the jumble of confused systems arose all those philosophic, religious, moral, and social aberrations which strive to root themselves in the human mind of the twentieth century. Among the Catholics themselves, whenever ambition or the malign influence of worldly allurements were in the ascendant, there were here and there excrescences of error which tended to diminish the vigor and integrity of the Christian spirit, and lead to that mongrel condition characterized under the name of "Liberal Catholicism."

Rationalism, properly speaking, began in Germany, a country which, until lately, has effected little in the domain of thought, and in the fields of faith and reason, except to ravage and destroy the creations of centuries. Unhappily, however, it has built up nothing in their place. Emmanuel Kant, born in Prussia in 1724, began the process of demolition. Materialistic philosophy had already denied the existence of the soul, and of the invisible world; Kant proceeded to the denial of any certitude regarding the material and visible. With him everything assumed the character of the mythical and ideal. To explain his process he invented in man a second reason, the practical reason, which reconstructs what the speculative reason destroys. In fact, by separating the faculties of the human soul from the objects which they perceive, he led the way to systematic scepticism.

Kant was followed by Fichte. As the former instituted a doubt as to the reality of external objects, Fichte declared that there was no external reality, that the universe surrounding us is only a fiction of the mind to which we alone give reality, and the world is only a form of our own activity. Kant and Fichte assailed the reality of things outside the "Ego," the personal mind; it remained for Schelling—born in 1775—to destroy both subject and object, and to confound all things mind and matter in one immutable, eternal existence. With Hegel, a disciple of Schelling everything becomes pure obscurity, absolute confusion, chaos. Hegelianism was, in principle, the identity of contradictories, the identity of truth and error, of good and evil. In him was verified the prophesy of Isaias of those "who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light, and light for darkness; who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter." It was a system that insinuated that nothing really exists, that existence is merely a happening; that truth is not truth in itself, that there is no definite truth. It was the affirmation and negation of one and the same thing, fact, or being, at one and the same time. It was important inasmuch as it led the way to systems even more bizarre and destructive in the intellectual and moral order.

Not to speak of the eclecticism of Cousin in the earlier days of the last century, which consisted in culling what he considered truth out of all the various philosophies of the past, without, however, having any definite idea of what was the truth, the chief product of German rationalism in the first half of the century was the system of Positivism. It consisted in confining human knowledge within the sole domain of the observation of the forces of matter, and the study of the mathematical laws and conditions which regulate these forces. Beyond that domain it declares that nothing exists scientifically. Neither first causes, final causes, nor the essences of things, ought—according to it—to be the object of scientific research, for these, it considers, are not science, but metaphysics. Under the name of metaphysics it included religion, theology, and moral teaching, all of which were to be simply eliminated as of no interest to men of intellect. Hegelianism had closed the eyes of human understanding; Positivism had mutilated and crippled its activities.

This disorderly system would have died with its author, August Compt, had not two of his disciples taken it up and given it a certain stability. One of these, M. Littré gave a resume of its teachings in 1845; but it was Taine who endowed it with a species of life, especially in his later writings. According to Littré, Positivism would do away with God, the Creator, the First Cause, the Final End, as subjects "worthy of childish minds." He declares that "outside the sphere of material and positive things the eye of the intelligence can perceive only an infinite void." He considers the soul, anatomically, as the ensemble of the functions of the brain and spinal column, and psychologically, as the ensemble of the functions of the cerebral sensibility. He denies all immortality and future life. "The dead," he declares, "survive only in the ideal existence which presents them to our memory, or in the part they played in the collective life of progress accomplished by humanity." There was to be no more religion or worship. Instead of supernatural ideas and the dogmas of faith it would substitute the cult of "humanity." Finally, in denying the existence of God he ceased to recognize the divinity of Christ, His miracles, and the divine authority of His Church.

The new philosophy became the fad. It was welcomed by young men impatient of restraint; it was preconized by free-thought in a congress of students at Liege; it descended into the workshops, infested the schools, and became a necessary accomplishment for professors in academies and colleges. The danger was increased by the hypocrisy of its writings. "One of the characteristic traits of modern irreligion," says Mgr. Baunard, "is that taint of poetry mingled with mysticism which accompanies the most blasphemous negations."

Out of the union of Hegelianism and Positivism—the negation of absolute truth, and the disdain of metaphysics—was born a new historical criticism, which repudiated a priori the supernatural as false and impossible. This new system taught that: "When criticism refuses to believe in the narration of miracles, it has no need to bring proofs to the support of its negation. What is narrated is false, simply because it cannot be," and again, it declares—"The