The Church and Modern Progress.
Vaticination, if we are to believe George Eliot, is only one of the
innumerable forms in which ignorance finds expression. In the olden time
prophecy for the most part assumed a sombre guise, denunciatory of woe
and wrath to come. In these latter days prophecy appears under the form
of _taffy_, which, perhaps, is indispensable for a generation whose
religious emotions find adequate musical expression in that popular
hymn, "The _Sweet_ Bye and Bye"--heaven being apparently a sort of
candy-shop on a large scale. Artemus Ward's famous advice, "Do not
prophesy until _after_ the event," is scarcely applicable to modern
prophets, inasmuch as the fulfilment of their predictions is not at all
necessary to their character and standing, unless, of course, they
should chance to be weather prophets.
The modern prophet dearly loves to take up some dominant idea of his
time, of such vastness and hazy indistinctness, as will afford ample
room and verge enough for his wildest speculations, and allow him to
disport at will within its undefined limits. An idea of this kind is
that which appertains to the progress of the species of humanity. With
this for his theme, the modern prophet, whether in the guise of a
popular lecturer, or masquerading as a writer in the current literature
of the day, rarely forgets, while weaving his rose-colored visions of
the future, to indulge in a fling at the Catholic Church as the
irreconcilable foe of progress in all its forms. Ask him what progress
means, in what respect the Catholic Church is opposed to it--the answer
will prove to be rather unsatisfactory. The constant cry of old
Aristotle--"Define, Define," is to him the voice of one calling in the
wilderness. If he ever read Cicero, it must have been in some expurgated
edition, "_Pueris Virginibusque_," in which the following passage found
no place: "_Omnis quae ratione suscipitur de aliqua re institutio
debet a definitione proficisi, ut intelligatur quid sit id de quo
disputetur._" _De offic._, 1, 2. The prophet of progress has an
instinctive dread of the bull-dog grip of a definition, and will not
readily run the risk of being pinned to the ground, and perhaps rolled
over in the dust. And yet the chief cause of controversy, of the heat
with which it is carried on, and its customary lack of decisive results,
lies in the fact that the disputants do not attach a definite meaning to
words, and do not understand them in the same sense.