ginning, as it will continue to believe to the end, that the way to reform society is to reform the individuals that go to make it up. Individual morality has social effects-it spreads out fan-shape, and does not stay at the point of starting. Christian dogma exists to preserve man from just such complete subserviency to the State, as would merge all his personal rights in his social duties, and leave not a wrack of his real self behind.

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When the Catholic Church bids men believe that if they separate their own individual interests from those of their fellow mortals, they are forfeiting that personal relation of union with God through Christ, in which the meaning of life consists, she is offering a motive and a sanction for social morality, which can be found nowhere else. And when she tells the faithful that their good is not to be sought individually, but in union with God and their fellowmen, she is preaching a religious truth, it is true, but one that has positive social effects lurking in it, more potent than your pure morality," or "a fellow feeling for one's kind." Neither communistic nor individualistic by nature, but partly both and wholly neither, she refuses to be identified with one or other of these blighting extremes. It was the idea of personality that cut her clear from the ancient world, in which she rose like a flaming star. That idea still cuts her clear from the world of the present. History may repeat itself, and again try ways and thoughts that have long since had their ineffectiveness established, but she who won a victory over the pagan world by the doctrine of the threefold personal relationship of God, neighbor, and man, is not going to lose the fruits of that victory to the modern accentuators of the impersonal in sociology and the indefinite in religion.

The narrower one's view of life, the less generous and inspiring will be the principles of action deriving from it. The dogmas of the Christian religion are an addition to the sum of human knowledge, and incentives to a conduct in keeping with them, which the unbeliever cannot appreciate, because he has never steered his courses by their lights, nor acted them out himself in practice. The man who has less religion is no fit judge of the man who has more, and the constant bickerings of the former at the latter are but superfluous proof that the greater has never yet in history been fairly comprehended by the less. To judge a fellow being, we must have the same qualities of mind, heart, and will as he. And oftentimes the critic of the man religious, so far from making an accurate observation of his believing kind, does but reveal a soul in which

the Christian springs of action have long since run dry. When we are told by such men as these that religious belief is powerless to influence conduct, we should take it as an unwitting act of selfrevelation on their part, not as an observation of ourselves, to whom truth has been committed in its fullness to moralize us the more.

There is more dogmatic utterance in the negative statement that conduct and creed go ways divided, than in all the positive pronouncements of the Church in history. The man who says that dogmatic belief makes no difference in moral conduct, presumes to judge Christian faith by his own inexperience of its promptings, and to settle an historical question of fact by some prejudice or other with which he happens to be imbued. Have such indifferentists studied history before coming to the adverse conclusion which they draw? Not they-it's all a nursery tale for them. And where have they found the good men and true who continue living up to the principles of a high morality? In a world still traveling on its acquired Christian momentum-of all places the last to choose for the proving of their thesis. The world in which we live is not entirely unchristian. The principles of social morality prevailing are not natural ethics at all, but the survival of Christian ideas without the faith that once gave them "might and meaning." Equality, fraternity, solidarity and such like notions all wear the Christian hall-marks of their origin. Public opinion itself is charged with a power mere ethics never could have given it, and never did. The very men who are loudest in declaring dogma superfluous erudition borrow its terms in their social theories, having none more effective in which to address their auditory. The repudiators of the Christian religion are all beneficiaries of it— parasites who would live by the letter, not by the spirit of that which made them what they are. What saves us from complete reversion to paganism is the Christian ideals which have become a permanent part of the ethics of mankind. And these ideals will not be successful for long in keeping the race up to its present levels, unless they are again united with the Christian realities from which they have been torn apart. Detached ideals will never hold us where we are or send us further forwards-belief in a personal God, and in our union with Him, can alone equip us with the power needed to overcome ourselves. The sources of power and action naturally within us are not, as history has shown, potent enough to compass our transformation.

Not all the dogmas of the Christian religion directly relate to

action. Some of them-the Trinity, for instance-concern knowledge rather than conduct. This fact was dwelt upon by Kant, and has been harped upon by a host of others since, as if it clearly justified the view that morality is independent of religion. But unless you deliver yourself over, body and soul, to the favorite modern fallacy that the end and aim of knowledge is action, not truth, the fact has no such significance at all, but one quite other. The Christian religion is a special life, intellectual and moral. The object of grace and the virtues is to assimilate our spiritual life to the life of God. The union of man with God, which Christianity teaches, is a union of personal friendship issuing in moral action, not a merely ethical relationship or ideal. And as friendship requires mutual knowledge for its basis-a service of the mind no. less than a service of the heart and will-all who are not professional mind-dividers or religion-reducers will readily see that knowledge no less than action is an essential part of the Christian life. To know God at all, in any real sense, creates within us the desire for further knowledge. The progress of the Christian life is towards the Known and the Loved, not towards ideals, but towards the Personal Being in Whom these ideals are infinitely fulfilled. It is only natural, therefore, that a religion professing to be more than an ethical system should proclaim truths to be believed no less than actions to be done. It is the ethical theory of the nature of Christianity that makes dogma look superfluous, and it is in the name of this defective theory that the moral influence of dogma is denied. Men lean upon this reed as if it were really a supporting staff.

Then, too, it does not follow that the doctrine of the Trinity has no relation to the life and action of the individual. It is a "practical proposition" for every individual to know whether Jesus Christ is the Son of God in very truth, and has actually established special means for salvation, which no one who values life at the meaning God set upon it is free to lay aside. And once a man decides for himself the practical question that Jesus is really the Son of God, come in the flesh to tell us who God is, what we are, and whitherward eventually our faltering, but assisted steps will lead, it becomes indirectly practical, I say, for such a one to know Christ in His personal existence and all that constituted His divine selfhood before He came. The "ethical naturalist" of the day sets himself and his little system up as the standard to which Christ and Christianity should conform. And only those who accept so much faith as can be made to dribble through a preconceived

philosophical system of small dimensions will fly in the face of history with such narrow negative dogmatists as these, who use their idea of Christ, and their idea of Christianity, as a dogma to destroy all dogmas other, as a yard-stick by which to measure God's utterances and man's obedience to His claims.

Which are the dogmas that expand the human soul, and which are those that stifle it? That is the question to be determined, for we are all dogmatists, and none more so than the ethical naturalist who says that dogma is without effect on conduct, basing his theory on a conception of the nature of dogma which would put the veriest tyro in Church History to the blush. Did you ever happen to notice that the man who rejects the dogmas of the Christian faith has to accept a lower creed, and a smaller view of himself and life in their stead? Did you ever distinctly realize that every man believes in some dogma, and guides his life accordingly? Ethical naturalist, scientific eugenist, economic determinist, independent moralist, religious indifferentist, undogmatic religionist, and whosoever else, all build their single-barreled systems and one-idea philosophies on the unhistorical dogmatic assumption that our present level of morality will be automatically maintained, without any conscious dependence upon the Divine assistance, to which the raising of morality to its present condition is historically due.

"The moral philosophy of Greece and Rome was, as we know, their whole religion; and yet it made few great lives possible and passed away with the stately sadness of a dying aristocrat of the old régime, retiring in pathetic impotence from the vulgar contact of the religion that was destined to make all things new." Is this to be our fate, to "make few great lives possible?" And was it progress to have returned to this ancient point of view, and to have despoiled the Christian religion of all its distinctive ideas and influences, on the poor warrant, the gratuitous assumption, the arbitrary and arrogant dogma that knowledge does not exist for its own sake, but solely for the sake of action, conduct and behavior? Out of this supposition sprang the theory-now become an axiomthan a man's religious beliefs have no influence on his morals. To which we would say, not so much by way of answer, as to throw out a suggestive reflection, that it is a distinct advantage sometimes to know the history of modern philosophy and the pedigree of some of its "axiomatic " truths.

University and Cathedral Sermons. By J. R. Illingworth, pp. 23, 24.

A FAMOUS CATHOLIC HISTORIAN: GODEFROID KURTH.

BY WILLIAM P. H. KITCHIN, PH.D.

T

HE last year or two Catholic letters and Catholic scholarship have lost many champions who had devoted their pens to the service of Faith and of Truth. Thus the English-speaking world has been deprived of Canon Sheehan, Monsignor Benson and Dr. Wilfrid Ward; France has lost Abbé Vigouroux, who for fifty years marched in the forefront of Biblical studies, and his friend and coworker Abbé Lesêtre; Italy has lost Father Fedele Savio, who for thirty years was associated with the learned enterprises of the Italian Jesuits, and who produced the erudite compilation entitled Gli Antichi Vescovi d'Italia dalle Origini al 1300; and Belgium laments the passing of Van Gehucten, the famous neurologist who died in exile at Cambridge, and more recently still the death of Godefroid Kurth, the pioneer to his countrymen of new methods. and aims in history.

Born in the province of Liège in 1847, Kurth, on the completion of his preliminary studies, went to Louvain for the higher course in arts and letters. There he laid the foundation of that painstaking and accurate scholarship, combined with a gift of fascinating literary expression, which ever after distinguished him. Having chosen teaching for his profession, he may be said to have introduced into Belgium a new school of historical and apologetic exposition. Just as Mr. Allard has made his own the history of early Christianity and told with admirable tact and wonderful research the story of the martyrs of the Roman Empire, just as Dom LeClercq is our surest guide through the perplexing labyrinth of Christian antiquities, so Kurth vindicated to himself the Middle Ages, and particularly the rôle his country played during that most interesting period. His writings range between the fifth and fifteenth centuries, and since the days of Frederick Ozanam few have had such a grasp of it as he; fewer still have put their talents as unreservedly at the service of the Church as he did. Kurth was by nature an eloquent apologist, full of sympathy and understanding for the deep, childlike piety of the Middle Ages, and in telling the