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ESSAY ON CATHOLICISM,

and man would remain an unfathomable mystery to mankind.

The importance of this demonstration, and its transcendent height as a standpoint, will be better seen farther on, when we shall sketch the sad and lamentable picture of our wanderings and our errors; and we shall find them all to arise, as from a fountainhead, from the negation of the Catholic supernaturalism. In this connection I may add that the constant and supernatural action of God upon society and upon man, is the wide and secure basis on which the edifice of Catholic doctrine rests; and that, deprived of this fundamental principle, this great edifice, in which the human race has free movement, falls leveled to the earth.

CHAPTER VII.

That the Catholic Church has triumphed over society, notwithstanding the same obstacles, and by the same supernatural means which rendered our Lord Jesus Christ victorious over the world.

The Catholic Church, as a religious institution, has exercised the same influence in society that Catholicism, as a doctrine, has exercised in the world; the same that our Lord Jesus Christ has exercised in man. And the reason is this: that our Lord Jesus Christ, his doctrine and his Church, are in reality only three different manifestations of the same thing; that is, the divine action supernaturally and simultaneously working in man and in all his faculties, in society and in all its institutions,our Lord Jesus Christ, Catholicism, and the Catholic

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