h ought
to lead to God. Fear implies the transgression of a law, and a law implies
a lawgiver and judge; but the tendency of intellectual culture is to
swallow up the fear in the self-reproach, and self-reproach is directed
and limited to our mere sense of what is fitting and becoming. Fear
carries us out of ourselves, whereas shame may act upon us only within the
round of our own thoughts. Such, I say, is the danger which awaits a
civilized age; such is its besetting sin (not inevitable, God forbid! or
we must abandon the use of God's own gifts), but still the ordinary sin of
the Intellect; conscience tends to become what is called a moral sense;
the command of duty is a sort of taste; sin is not an offence against God,
but against human nature.

The less amiable specimens of this spurious religion are those which we
meet not unfrequently in my own country. I can use with all my heart the
poet's words,

"England, with all thy faults, I love thee still;"

but to those faults no Catholic can be blind. We find there men possessed
of many virtues, but proud, bashful, fastidious, and reserved. Why is
this? it is because they think and act as if there were really nothing
objective in their religion; it is because conscience to them is not the
word of a lawgiver, as it ought to be, but the dictate of their own minds
and nothing more; it is because they do not look out of themselves,
because they do not look through and beyond their own minds to their
Maker, but are engrossed in notions of what is due to themselves, to their
own dignity and their own consistency. Their conscience has become a mere
self-respect. Instead of doing one thing and then another, as each is
called for, in faith and obedience, careless of what may be called the
_keeping_ of deed with deed, and leaving Him who gives the command to
blend the portions of their conduct into a whole, their one object,
however unconscious to themselves, is to paint a smooth and perfect
surface, and to be able to say to themselves that they have done their
duty. When they do wrong, they feel, not contrition, of which God is the
object, but remorse, and a sense of degradation. They call themselves
fools, not sinners; they are angry and impatient, not humble. They shut
themselves up in themselves; it is misery to them to think or to speak of
their own feelings; it is misery to suppose that others see them, and
their shyness and sensitiveness often become morbid. As to confess