e, respectively, the great
laws of nature and society and reduce them to rules and codes, yet
without adding or taking away from these facts, that are true whether
they are popularly recognized or not--and all with the purpose not of
diminishing but of increasing the general liberty--so the Church,
divinely safeguarded too in the process, takes the Revelation of Christ
and by her dogma and her discipline popularizes it, so to speak, and
makes it at once comprehensible and effective.

What, then, is this foolish cry about the slavery of dogma? How can
Truth make men anything except more free? Unless a man is prepared to
say that the scientist enslaves his intellect by telling him facts, he
dare not say that the Church fetters his intellect by defining dogma.
Christ did not condemn the Pharisaic system because it was a system, but
because it was Pharisaic; because, that is, it was not true; because it
obscured instead of revealing the true relations between God and man;
because it _made the Word of God of none effect through its traditions_.

But the Catholic system has the appearance of enslaving men? Why yes;
for the only way of aiming at and using effectively the _truth that
makes us free_ is by _bringing into captivity every understanding to the
obedience of Christ_.

VIII

CORPORATENESS AND INDIVIDUALISM

_He that shall lose his life for My sake shall find it. For what doth it
profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own
soul?_--MATT. XVI. 25, 26.

No recorded word of our Lord better illustrates than does this the
startling and paradoxical manner of His teaching. For He Who _knew what
was in man_, Who spoke always down to man's deepest interests, dwelt and
spoke therefore in that realm of truth where man's own paradoxical
nature is most manifest; where his interests appear to flourish only by
being ruthlessly pruned; where he rises to the highest development of
self only by self-mortification. This is, in fact, the very lesson
Christ teaches in these words. To _find the life_ is the highest object
of every man and the end for which he was created; yet this can be
attained only by the _losing of it for Christ's sake_. Individuality can
be preserved only by the sacrifice of Individualism. Let us break up
this thought and consider it more in detail.

I. (i) Catholics, it is said, are the most fundamentally selfish people
in the whole world, since all that they do and say and t