Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/321

man is the only one who rules over all things created, while in the tabernacle inhabited by the divine essence he is the person of the Son, in all things equal to the person of the Father and to the person of the Holy Ghost. I am far from supposing that this argument 1is unanswerable, or that these analogies are perfect. For any one to imagine that man can fully sound the depths of these profound mysteries, would be a remarkable proof of ignorance, and the mere attempt to raise the divine veil that covers them, appears to me to be a stupid arrogance, extravagance, and folly. No ray of light has the power to illuminate what God has hidden in the impenetrable tabernacle which guards the divine counsels. I only propose to prove by a rigorous demonstration, that what God has ordered us to believe, far from being absurd, 1s not only credible but likewise reasonable. I think that the demonstration can be carried even to the limits of evidence when it simply undertakes to elucidate the truth, that everything which departs from faith terminates in the absurd, and that the obscurity in which divine truths are involved is less profound than human darkness. There is no Catholic dogma nor mystery which does not combine the two conditions essential to a reasonable belief, first, to furnish to those who accept it a satisfactory explication of the whole, and second, to be in itself, to a certain degree, capable of explanation and comprehension. There is no man possessed of a sound reason and good intention who will not testify of himself—on the one hand, that he is radically impotent to discover revealed truths unaided, and on the other, that he is endowed with a surprising aptitude for explaining all these truths in a manner relatively satis-