hat way she is to perish."

* * * * *

You see, gentlemen, if you trust the judgment of a sagacious mind, deeply
read in history, Catholic Theology has nothing to fear from the progress
of Physical Science, even independently of the divinity of its doctrines.
It speaks of things supernatural; and these, by the very force of the
words, research into nature cannot touch.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

PULVIS ET UMBRA[7]

We look for some reward of our endeavors, and are disappointed; not
success, not happiness, not even peace of conscience, crowns our
ineffectual efforts to do well. Our frailties are invincible, our virtues
barren; the battle goes sore against us to the going down of the sun. The
canting moralist tells us of right and wrong; and we look abroad, even on
the face of our small earth, and find them change with every climate, and
no country where some action is not honored for a virtue and none where it
is not branded for a vice; and we look in our experience, and find no
vital congruity in the wisest rules, but at the best a municipal fitness.
It is not strange if we are tempted to despair of good. We ask too much.
Our religions and moralities have been trimmed to flatter us, till they
are all emasculate and sentimentalized, and only please and weaken. Truth
is of a rougher strain. In the harsh face of life, faith can read a
bracing gospel. The human race is a thing more ancient than the ten
commandments; and the bones and revolutions of the Kosmos, in whose joints
we are but moss and fungus, more ancient still.

Of the Kosmos in the last resort, science reports many doubtful things,
and all of them appalling. There seems no substance to this solid globe on
which we stamp: nothing but symbols and ratios. Symbols and ratios carry
us and bring us forth and beat us down; gravity, which swings the
incommensurable suns and worlds through space, is but a figment varying
inversely as the squares of distances; and the suns and worlds
themselves, imponderable figures of abstraction, NH{3} and H{2}O.
Consideration dares not dwell upon this view; that way madness lies;
science carries us into zones of speculation, where there is no habitable
city for the mind of man.

But take the Kosmos with a grosser faith, as our senses give it us. We
behold space sown with rotatory islands, suns and worlds and the shards
and wrecks of systems: some, like the sun, still blazing; some rotting,