by the first goods train that passes over it; let potatoes or oats be sown in a soil not suited to them, and the crop will be a failure. In like manner, society, either in its political or economic action, cannot go on irrespective of the moral and divine law. It was tried in old Rome by the wisest and the ablest men the world has ever known, and we have seen what came of it. As Lecky pointed out, the Catholic Church simply taught the doctrines of the equality of men, the sacredness of marriage, the rights of woman, the spirit of sacrifice, the duty and dignity of labour-none of them directly economic, but all bound up with the mystery of the Incarnation-and selfishness, slavery, divorce, luxury, and the other social evils which began in naturalism and finally ruined Roman society, had no part in the new civilisation, as far as the Church could prevent it, or human passion yielded to its principles.

We must not identify human or social progress with mere material or industrial progress. They are quite separable, and are often found apart. They are neither necessarily opposed nor necessarily united. One is found without the other, for instance, in the millionaire who has no higher notion than making money, and he makes it; whose highest aspirations are on a level with the luxury which wealth can minister. Old Rome was in a state of national decadence at the time when its literature, art, and wealth were at their highest. A man may subdue the forces of nature and turn them to his use by the application of science, and when he has made himself most the master of matter may have become most its slave. It can be so with a nation also.

Human progress and civilisation then must not be identified with material progress; with gas, electricity, railroads and factories. "Not in bread alone doth man live." Progress is the natural growth and ripening of anything from its first germs or principles to its per

fection. An oak grows from an acorn. A man develops, in size, symmetry, and strength, from infancy to manhood. But that is only physical progress; it is not human progress, for a man may grow muscular and fat and remain a fool. There is then intellectual progress, when his mind assimilates thoughts as his body assimilates food. But that is not all which is implied in human progress. What if a clever man uses his superior sharpness to cheat his neighbour and to live on his wits? We could not rightly call him a man of progress, or a type of civilised humanity, who habitually went to market or to the Stock Exchange, leaving his conscience at home with his prayer-book in the pocket of his Sunday coat; we should rather call him a "clever devil." What applies to the individual, applies to the family, to the nation, and to society at large.

Industrialism is not civilisation; industrial progress is undoubtedly both a law and a duty for a people, but it is not their highest law, nor their first duty.

But sometimes virtue starves, while vice is fed, What then? Is the reward of virtue bread? * I HAVE now pointed out the wide difference there is between human progress and mere material progress. To speak then of the progress of a people because of their industrial spirit or material prosperity is plainly to treat man as an animal ad fruges consumere natus. And the position is not improved even though the claims of intelligence be considered, if the intelligence is trained solely with a view to material progress; for in that case the mind is made a mere machine to minister

to the appetites of sense. The soul becomes in practical life a function of matter, however spiritual be the philosophy we may follow in theory. Human progress or civilisation implies improvement and expansion in all the

Pope.-Line 149-150.

elements which make up man's nature, in all the human interests of a people. The will and the heart are the great motive forces in human activity, and if due attention is not given to the proper cultivation of those, the attempt to build a truly prosperous nation is as vain as the task of the fool in the Gospel who tried to build his house on sand. The old Romans tried it, and they ended in miserable failure; and no people of to-day are more worldly wise than they were. By the most natural process they passed from comfort to wealth, from wealth to luxury, from luxury to indolence, from indolence to selfishness, and thence through "the survival of the fittest to the distinction between the few masters who alone were citizens of the great Republic, and the multitudes who were their slaves and chattels.

It was the Catholic Church built up civilization again, and led men along the way of human progress.

I have already pointed out the mistake which SirHorace Plunkett has made in representing the Catholic Church as "completely shifting the moral centre of gravity to the future existence." I now recall his argument, that its reliance on authority is an impediment to progress, inasmuch as it checks initiative and selfreliance.

If reliance on authority be a check to individual initiative and an obstacle to progress, how is progress possible at all? Authority is an essential element in every society. It is authority which gives unity and stability to society and is the safeguard of the liberty of its members. Society is the offspring of human intelligence and liberty. Civil authority unifies millions of individuals of different personal interests and passions, and makes them act with common national interest and purpose. It guards the rights and liberties of each, protecting each from the injustice or the despotism of the selfish and strong. Any society, from a municipal corporation

to a nation, is simply inconceivable without an authority to rule it. Authority, so far from lessening individual liberty was conceived by human intelligence and established by human liberty for its own safeguard; and thus it is not an obstacle, but a help to initiative, and is a necessary condition of human progress. If anyone complain that his liberty is restricted in not being allowed to invade the rights of others, he has to explain how he came by the right to invade their rights and thus to restrict the liberty of his neighbour. For his complaint implies simply that others have no rights or liberties in the presence of his, that he has unlimited liberty, and even the right to do wrong. We thus alight on the difference on the one hand between authority which secures liberty and despotism which restrains it; and on the other hand, the difference between liberty which is the birthright of everybody, and license-the abuse of liberty-which is the right of nobody. The truth is, authority and liberty are two phases of one and the same principle.

Sir Horace will remind me that he was not speaking of civil, but of religious authority. But, then, how is it that authority which secures individual liberty in the State, restrains it in the Church? Authority is the safeguard of liberty also in religion, he will reply, except in the Catholic Church. It is reliance on that authority which "represses individuality," "checks the growth of the qualities of initiative and self-reliance," and is for that reason an impediment to progress. But how would he explain, then, the genesis of liberty, the impulse to enterprise, the birth, growth, and the vast strides of human progress which began at the dawn of the Middle Ages, when there was no power but Catholicism to create them, and whilst it was in the power of the Catholic Church to check their growth or to nip them in the bud if

it chose? And Guizot,* together with every non-Catholic historian of name, admits that human progress in all its phases was then protected and promoted by the Catholic Church. Sir Horace saves me the trouble of more quotation, for he himself admits it all; and yet he denies the possibility in principle of what he admits has happened in fact.

Every Catholic knows, unless those "Catholics" who are outside everything Catholic except the name, that he is as free as air in all his political and economic, in his temporal activities and relations of all sorts, as long as he does not run counter to the teaching or discipline of that Church which he believes to have been instituted by Christ to expound the moral and divine Law, and to guard their observance by the necessary discipline of life. And the doctrine and discipline of the Catholic Church gives every member of it plenty of scope for all the economic activity he wishes to put forth. I know that Catholics may not lawfully believe or do some things as to which non-Catholics enjoy untrammelled scope for thought and action. But, if those things are false it is not liberty of thought to assent to them; if those things are wrong it is not liberty of action to do them. It is not liberty of thought or of action, but license in both, that lets a man think what is false and do what is wrong. I do my neighbour an injustice I do not use my liberty; I abuse it. It is an act, not of liberty, but of license. In truth, there is no such thing in nature as free-thought. It is a chimera; a crude expression without a meaning.

If

Authority in society is for the sake of and is the safeguard of the liberty of the subject. But what is the safeguard of authority? Force may make it feared; only re

*Histoire generale de la Civilisation en Europe. 2ieme, 3ieme, 5ieme Leçon.-In this last place (page 132, 3rd Edition, 1840), he says: "Her influence on modern civilisation has been immense, greater perhaps than has ever been imagined by her most ardent adversaries or her most zealous advocates." Milman, Hallam, and others bear similar testimony.