n the Roman. How
can a selection be made among them, except by such an appeal to Reason?
Religion and Science must both submit their claims and their dissensions
to its arbitrament.

Against this the Vatican Council protests. It exalts faith to a
superiority over reason; it says that they constitute two separate
orders of knowledge, having respectively for their objects mysteries
and facts. Faith deals with mysteries, reason with facts. Asserting the
dominating superiority of faith, it tries to satisfy the reluctant mind
with miracles and prophecies.

On the other hand, Science turns away from the incomprehensible, and
rests herself on the maxim of Wiclif: "God forceth not a man to believe
that which he cannot understand." In the absence of an exhibition of
satisfactory credentials on the part of her opponent, she considers
whether there be in the history of the papacy, and in the biography of
the popes, any thing that can adequately sustain a divine commission,
any thing that can justify pontifical infallibility, or extort that
unhesitating obedience which is due to the vice-God.

One of the most striking and vet contradictory features of the Dogmatic
Constitution is, the reluctant homage it pays to the intelligence of
man. It presents a definition of the philosophical basis of Catholicism,
but it veils from view the repulsive features of the vulgar faith. It
sets forth the attributes of God, the Creator of all things, in words
fitly designating its sublime conception, but it abstains from affirming
that this most awful and eternal Being was born of an earthly mother,
the wife of a Jewish carpenter, who has since become the queen of
heaven. The God it depicts is not the God of the middle ages, seated
on his golden throne, surrounded by choirs of angels, but the God of
Philosophy. The Constitution has nothing to say about the Trinity,
nothing of the worship due to the Virgin--on the contrary, that is by
implication sternly condemned; nothing about transubstantiation, or
the making of the flesh and blood of God by the priest; nothing of the
invocation of the saints. It bears on its face subordination to the
thought of the age, the impress of the intellectual progress of man.

THE PASSAGE OF EUROPE TO LLAMAISM. Such being the exposition rendered to
us respecting the attributes of God, it next instructs us as to his
mode of government of the world. The Church asserts that she possesses a
supernatural control over all m