Radio Replies Vol 4 - Catholic Apologetics Online

That again involves the blasphemy that God has authority only provided we approve of what He commands. It is true that God, being good, can will only what is good. But the practical conclusion for us is that what God wills must be good. And once we know God's will, there is no room for human speculation as to whether it is good or not. For us, the manifestation of God's will at once imposes on us the duty of obedience to it and the acknowledgment of His authority. It is useful to train children to form right estimates of good and bad actions; but it would be fatal to leave them with the idea that their approval or disapproval is the deciding factor as to what is good or bad, and that they can suspend obedience to God's known laws until they decide whether what He commands meets with their approval or not. Once God's law is known we owe it obedience because it is His law.

That is a prejudiced and fanciful way of saying that religion makes children conscientious, and that wherever they may be they will not be able to escape a sense of responsibility to God. Is it such a dreadful thing that, if a person does evil, even when no fellow human being observes it, he should experience a sense of guilt? And what can become of a society which has lost the most solid of its guarantees, a sense of the moral law of God? Listen to this candid admission. Marique Schterenstedt, a Swedisbi author, writing in the "Veko Journalen," in 1935, records the verdict oil a Soviet directress of a godless elementary school. This directress said: "As a child I received a religious education, but I emancipated myself from the trammels of a religious faith. Now, when I see perverse, cruel, coarse, insolent children, most of whom are little thieves, I do not know what to do with them, or how to control them. We have renounced the ten commandments of God, and have entirely repudiated the doctrine of charity. But how can I bring home to the children that stealing is wrong, and that one ought not to be insolent? The children give intelligent answers to ordinary questions, but is the present system fashioning men better and more thoroughly? No, a thousand times no." No civilization can last wjthout moral forces influencing souls and consciences; and these moral forces cannot be separated from religion. The love of God is the greatest driving force for producing the love of our fellow men; and to close heaven from which it radiates will throw the world back to brutality and barbarism.

You overlook the distinction between sin and the sinner; between error and the person who holds it. Christian ethics nowhere commend tolerance of irreligion or sympathy for the blatant unbelief of those who mock God and Christianity. Towards the persons of unbelievers we are bidden to be tolerant, sympathizing with them in the mental state for which possibly their upbringing has been responsible. But whilst we are obliged to do our best to find an excuse for them which will mitigate their moral responsibility, we are certainly not obliged to be tolerant towards their contempt for religion, and to have so little understanding as to allow them to control the education of our children in favor of secularism and irreligion.

That Paul Blanshard can see any parallel between Catholicism and Communism shows how little he knows of Catholicism. Communism denies; God and acknowledges no authority or law above that of the State. Catholicism declares that all men, rulers and ruled alike, societies as well as individuals, are subject to the law of God. Rulers have duties and obligations to God and to their subjects the violation of which can take them to hell as well as anybody else. As for the ruling order finding Catholicism so useful, or any form of Christianity for that matter, why are Communists, in their efforts to gain supreme and despotic control, determined to stamp it out? Why, in Russia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, are Protestant, Orthodox and Catholic churchmen flung into prison or shot as traitors; i.e., as not being useful to the ruling order?

Surely you will not deny that there is a true patriotic discipline. The citizen who, through love of his country and devotedness to its welfare, is moved voluntarily to observe its just laws, has a genuine spirit of patriotic discipline. But for your consolation I can assure you that patriotic discipline does not require subservience to unjust laws imposed by tyrannical rulers who manifestly exceed the due limits of legitimate authority.

That is not true. A spirit of discipline is the outcome of a spirit of obedience, and obedience is but one of the moral virtues, annexed to the cardinal virtue of justice, the observance of which is one of the byproducts of Catholic religious training. To pretend that the function of religion is limited to the production of only one of its by-products is absurd. Again, even where obedience is concerned, the Catholic religion is essentially interested in an observance of law and order which is voluntary. It does not inculcate an obedience which is due only to physical compulsion. If people do not yield to the influence of their religion, if they will not voluntarily fulfill their duties, then the Catholic Church as such has no means of enforcing discipline. That becomes a matter for parents, teachers or State authorities. Yet more. The Catholic religion insists that obedience is due primarily to the law of God and that any human legislation which conflicts with the law of God must be resisted. No value attaches to statements which ignore these necessary distinctions as if they did not exist.

You could launch the same attack on the obedience of children to their parents, of pupils to their teachers, of soldiers to their officers, of citizens to the laws of their country. All forms of discipline could fall under the same extravagant condemnation. But let us take the subject of the Catholic religion. That religion does not spread the habit of submission always, everywhere, to everybody, in everything. It demands submission to the law of God and refusal of submission to everybody and everything opposed to the law of God. It obliges obedience to parental and civil authority within their lawful limits-. And it insists that those possessing authority must not abuse it. Religion does not exist to help those in office to establish themselves permanently in a position of authority which they may use for their own profit and advantage. It insists that authority must be exercised for the benefit of the governed, directing society for the common good. If all authority is to be condemned, then the logical result would be anarchy and the destruction of all law and order.

Such a notion is false both in theory and in fact. Theoretically, religion insists on the absolute authority of God as superior to that of all men on this earth. If rulers or politicians bring in any law, or try to impose any measures, opposed to the law of God, then religion demands that God must be obeyed rather than man. But deny God's absolute authority, grant absolute authority to the State, or to any group of individuals which gets control of the machinery of government, and then indeed the way is open to political exploitation. That your statement is false in fact history itself proves. I will give you only one instance. Anyone who knows English history knows that it was Archbishop Stephen Langton of Canterbury! in England's Catholic days, who resisted the tyranny of King John and forced him to sign the "Magna Charta," safeguarding the people against that tyrant's political exploitation. It was to religion that the English people owed that great vindication of their liberties.

I wish you had been able to go to Russia and convince Stalin of that. Far from finding the teaching of religion a very desirable thing, he knew that he could not succeed completely in his political exploitation of the people so long as they acknowledged any authority superior to his. So he suppressed all religious schools and banished the teaching of religion in any schools. He ridiculed, mocked, vilified and persecuted those who adhered to religion, boasting that he would stamp it out of existence. You yourself could not have dictated a more ardent campaign for the destruction of religion than that undertaken by Stalin precisely because it was not a desirable thing "from the point of view of the ruling order."

Catholic schools do not exist in order to keep people religiously divided. Their purpose is to see that Catholics are thoroughly instructed in their religion as well as in other necessary matters. The fact that we are] all Americans does not mean that we must all have one and the same religion whether we like it or not. And if it is lawful for a Catholic to be a Catholic in this country, it is better for him to be a thoroughly well-instructed and good Catholic than to be an ignorant and bad one.

So long as Catholics remain Catholics and Protestants remain Protestants religious divisions among the people "will be exactly the same whether there are Catholic schools or not. The better instructions of Catholics in their religion would make no difference to that. The only way in which religious differences in this country can be abolished is by everyone of us adopting the same religion, whatever religion that might be, or by everyone of us abandoning religion of any kind and being of no religion.

The Protestant leaders you have mentioned are not content with the present secular system of education in Australia. Repeatedly and publicly they have blamed it for the immense driftage of people from their own Churches into religious indifference. The Anglican "Church Times" recently quoted an episcopal pronouncement that "the Anglican laity are the most poorly instructed in Christendom"; whilst Canon Bryan Green, a recent visitor to Australia, said that "the average student substituted confusionism for religion," having no more than "little bits of ideas about little bits of religion." Whilst they do not like the secular system of education, however, they object to the Catholic school system which Catholics have the generosity to maintain, a generosity they cannot get their own people to imitate.

Catholics regard it as not less important that succeeding generations of Catholics should be well-instructed in the Christian religion than that they should be adequately taught other and secular subjects. Your description of the Catholic religion as "Romish" and as "superstitious" is due to your lack of knowledge concerning it.

That is true. What are known as the democracies have unfortunately I largely become pagan countries. I do not mean that they are adopting religious paganism, substituting a pagan religion for the Christian religion. If Nor are they positively anti-Christian. They are simply throwing Christianity away and ignoring religion altogether. And Australia, just as the other democracies, is rapidly becoming a godless country, even though it does not proclaim open warfare against God.

Secular education has undoubtedly been a major factor in producing religionless Australians. Let me quote for you two very prominent men, one in England and the other in America, both of them non-Catholics. In a broadcast address from the B.B.C., shortly before his death, Archbishop Temple of Canterbury said: "Modern English culture regards faith in God as a dispensable indulgence. This reaches its climax in our educational system. We have supposed that it is possible to provide education which is religiously neutral, to which religion can then be added in greater or less measure. But, in fact, an education which is not religious is atheistic; there is no middle way. If you give to children an account of the world from which God is left out, you are teaching them to understand the world without reference to God." According to Archbishop Temple, therefore, the fruit of secular education is a generation of godless atheists in the end. Let us now turn to Walter Lippman, the noted American author. Not long ago, in an address at Philadelphia, he spoke as follows: "Modern man, as turned out by our secular schools and as he is shaped by the prevailing popular culture, is a being who lives not according to reason but only to get more and more satisfaction. The secular man, who obeys his impulses, knows no reason that transcends his wishes, and has as his chief article of faith an ideal of secular progress, is now dominant in the world. Men cannot remain civilized when they have rejected the culture of their civilization; when they no longer discipline themselves and their children in the tradition which comes to them from the Prophets and the Saints, and the Teachers and the Philosophers, and the Discoverers, who raised Western Man out of barbarism." The fruits of secular education, which Archbishop Temple has perceived in England, and Walter Lippman in America, are clearly evident, to all who have eyes to see in Australia and in America.

That is explained to a very great extent as a logical result of the Protestant Reformation, with the uncertainty in religion, the endless divisions of the Protestant denominations, and the loss of faith on the part of multitudes of their adherents. But whilst the adoption of secularism! is largely explained by this, it is not excused by it. The sight of the trouble to which the Reformation led should have inspired men, not to abandon religion altogether, but to return to the Catholic Church our forefather should never have left.

He was deploring the ever-growing neglect of religion amongst members of the non-Catholic Churches. But I do not think it fair to say to these people that they have "walked out on God." The truth is that the Churches are reaping the fruit of their acceptance of a merely secular educational system, and of their neglect of the due religious instruction and training of their children.

That could not apply to Catholics who oppose Communism far more on religious grounds than on economic and political grounds; though oil course they make full allowance for the latter also. And although what! Mr. Vogt said is largely true, there are many good Protestants who share the Catholic viewpoint in this matter.

He did. But why did he not denounce the various Protestant ministers ! who have made statements of the same nature as my own, and equally as strong? To make such a protest only when a Catholic priest says what they also have said makes it difficult to avoid the conclusion that it was a question, not of what was said, but of the religion of the one who said it, Needless to say, he had no right to distort my criticism of State education into a condemnation of the morals of all who have attended State schools. It is one thing to trace a high percentage of failures back to a faulty system of secular education; quite another to conclude that therefore all who have received that education are corrupt. Many will be good in spite of the faulty system of education in State schools, whether by sheer force of natural character, or the corrective influence of a good home. But that does not justify our defective system of secular education.

In discussing that matter, I said that the first place to seek the cause ! of juvenile delinquency will be in the training of the children; and II declared our religionless and secular educational system to be the cause j to a great extent. In support of that I quoted a letter written to me by a Protestant lawyer who deplored the prevalence of juvenile delinquency* insisted that the State school child has simply not been taught the moral law as a definite part of his education, and declared that he would like to see a text-book explaining the ten commandments made compulsory in every school throughout Australia.

The right of any citizen to point out what is to the harm of his country and what will be to its good. But if you are going to blame me for this, at least be impartial and blame all others who say the same thing. In a recent book, Mr. Sidney Dark, former editor of the "Church i Times," an Anglican periodical, said: "In the Church today there is a '] widespread interest in efforts to secure the teaching of religion in all the j schools. There is a new and also widespread feeling outside the Church of England that the nation has suffered morally from the common abandon- > ment of definite religious teaching. Nonconformists, who before the last war were bitterly opposed to the Church on this matter of education, are - now largely in agreement." At the recent Methodist Conference in Sydney the Rev. Alan Walker said that because religion and education had been separated, Australia was rapidly becoming pagan. And he added these strong words: "The Christian faith should be taught as a regular subject in the curriculum. The Sunday School and denominational schools are no longer a sufficient answer to the need of the day. To redesign the educational system on a Christian basis will mean a revolution, but a revolution in this field has long been overdue."

When the Government decided to make the education of all Australian children a State responsibility, it thought that, since the people of Australia professed so many different religions, the best way to avoid giving offense to anybody was to teach no religion. At the time when the Government began to appropriate revenue for the building of State schools, all the major religious bodies had their own religious schools. Protestants grasped at the free education offered by the State, thus sparing themselves the expense of maintaining their own religious schools; but Catholics, more deeply convinced of the necessity of religion, continued to maintain, develop and expand their own religious schools, despite their having to do so at their own expense and without any financial assistance from the Government.

That is a very difficult problem. Religion cannot be taught under the auspices of a Government which constitutionally declares that it does not officially recognize any religion. Nor can any definite religion be taught by State school teachers of any religion or none. The only feasible plan is for Churches interested enough in the religious welfare of their people to establish their own religious schools, to exist side by side with the State schools. The people would thus have a choice between sending their children to religious schools or to secular schools. Of course this would call for self-sacrifice on the part of those who believe in religious education; but if they believed in their religion enough they would not grudge that. Catholics at least have shown the strength of their convictions in this matter.

If the motive were no more than one of prudence or expediency, such, an idea would have to be rejected. The breakdown of social life and1 morality in almost every field may fill people with alarm. But we must not think of God merely as a means towards bolstering up a social fabric threatening to collapse. There is an old saying that honesty is the best policy, but that once it becomes mere policy it ceases to be honesty. For then it is not love of what is right for its own sake; it is doing what is right so long as it pays! Religion is not like that. It must be taught first and foremost because it is right that it should be. To overlook that and to dwell on the temporal advantages of religion to the community is to promote religion on a false basis. We would be religious utilitarians, and encourage others in similar folly.

It is very important, but not the supremely important thing in itself, A sound religious training has, as one of its results, the formation of a good character. But religion must not be valued merely as an ingredient for producing good citizens. The main purpose of religion is to inspire men to love, worship and glorify God, to avoid all that cOuld displease God, and to attain to an eternal destiny of happiness with God. If men conscientiously serve God, then as a result they will be found to be! devoted to all lesser duties in social and domestic life. The religious motive, therefore, must be the fact that God is God, and that we exist to serve Him; not that He exists to serve us.

Religion could not be taught successfully in the public schools, even were the Government ever to permit it.

Whilst religion is just as much a subject as other subjects, it retains its difference in nature from other subjects, just as they in turn differ among themselves. For example, geography, theory of music, history and literature may all be equally subjects, but they are not like each other in character or in method of approach.

No public school teachers, of course, could be compelled to believe in religion.. But if they did not believe in it they should not be permitted to teach it. Children are influenced by the beliefs and convictions of those who teach them much more than by mere words. No religious teaching will influence the lives of the children as it should unless inspired by sincere belief. The children will be quick to detect the cynical attitude of an unbelieving teacher; and that teacher would really be teaching, not religion, but irreligion.

That is to suggest, not the teaching of religion, but teaching about religion. The idea of teaching it in a secular manner is to prevent children from developing any spirit of reverence for it, and from experiencing any sense of duty towards God. But the true idea of teaching religion is precisely to give children a religious outlook, making them conscious of a personal relationship with God, aware that He is their Father, that they are destined for eternal life with Him, and that they should love and serve Him even now. Religion is not a secular thing and it cannot be divorced from the notion of God's authority. To try to teach it in the way the professor suggests would not be to teach religion at all.

He has jumped from the question of teaching of religion to the comparative study of religions, a very different matter. Christians, who demand the Christian education of their children, do not ask for a comparative study of all religions. The Christian education of a child demands that the Christian religion be made a part of that child's training, not that it should be taught about other and false religions. And far from being rejected, the idea that the Bible is a "Sacred Book" would have to be insisted upon.

The professor in question subscribes to the secular dogma that the one great evil in the world is religious dogma. Were the children given the impression he desires, namely, that the Bible has no greater value than its literary value, they would receive a quite erroneous impression. And it is not the purpose of education to give erroneous impressions. The Bible contains a divine revelation dealing with the relationships between God and man, and explaining man's condition, duties and eternal destiny. It is this divine message of the Bible which must be taught, and which your professor does not want to be taught.

Since they are not that, they should not be put before the children as that. Atheists may have adopted such a view. But whence did they derive it? Certainly not from anything resembling reliable evidence. As a matter of fact, the rationalist criticism of the Gospels was never really scientific, and has never advanced any but specious arguments. It was never scientific, for it was poisoned by presuppositions with which science had nothing to do. It was prejudiced against the supernatural and in favor of a theory of religious development quite against historical facts. Rationalist critics calmly gave out to the world as certain what was merely their own guesswork based upon the most unscientific assumptions. And the idea that the Gospels are but a series of stories of a folk-lore character has no better foundation than that.

Were the Christian religion taught as it should be, the child would get a right idea of ethics by being taught its principles and by being shown the weakness of depraved theories opposed to those principles. Far from seeing any failure to reconcile the natural and the supernatural, the child would see that the supernatural is not opposed to the natural but presupposes and perfects it. And the study of miracle and prophecy would help towards an understanding of the limits Of the field within which our natural sciences can operate.

Christian educationalists are not interested in instruction rather than in education. They want Christian children educated as Christians, with a knowledge and understanding of their Christian faith, a love for it, and the will to practice it in their daily lives.

They wish Christianity to be taught to Christian children. Believing in Christ's divine authority, they naturally do not want His religion to be taught as merely on the same level as man-made substitute religions. The fact that children are taught that their Christian religion is alone the true religion does not prevent them from making it the object of sound critical study without any trace of skepticism nor from using their own intelligence to secure a greater understanding of it. It is a glaring fallacy to imagine that a critical study and intelligent consideration Of things already known to be true are impossible.

Naturally. But what is wrong with that? I do not remember a single subject in the curriculum, during my school days, that was not presented in an authoritarian way. In a very authoritarian way the master in the State schools I attended told us what we had to know and believe in history and geography, how we were to write English, the methods we were to employ in arithmetic, and so on with all else; and implicitly we accepted and tried to apply all that the teacher authoritatively demanded of us. It is absurd to make a bogey of pedagogical authority the moment religion is mentioned, as though there can be no certainty of the truth of any religion, even of Christianity. Irreligious people may think in such a way, but Christians do not; and they have the right to bring up their children in the Christian religion they know to be true. As this cannot be done in the public schools, Catholics have exercised their undeniable parental rights by establishing their own religious schools wherever possible.

Granted that a religious doctrine has been revealed by God, it is no longer an open question as to whether it is true or not.

If Christian parents want their children to have a religious training as Christians, the ideal is that those children should be taught thoroughly all the essential things a Christian is expected to know and to do; and that they should be induced, both by good example and earnest persuasion, to believe and to behave as Christians should. All talk of children wandering through the garden of the world's religions, feasting on beauty and gathering blooms, far from being an ideal of any kind, is rubbish.

Christians want their children to have the religion of Christ, not a religion selected by the children themselves after wandering through the world's religions which their child-intelligence could not hope to understand. It is incredible that anyone could suggest that the art of training the child of Christian parents in religion is to free the child from any training by its elders, let it study the world's religions for itself, and accept the conclusions - if any - that happen to float into its bewildered little brain! The religion children would get from that would not be deep and strong; it would not be their own; it would not be that of its elders; it would be non-existent.

They should be taught not to remain self-satisfied with an inadequate knowledge of what they ought to know. Their minds should be open to receive further worth-while knowledge they have not yet got. But they should not have minds open to everything and never certain of anything. Surely the purpose of the mind is to know the truth; and every truth known with certainty at once closes it to doubts and uncertainty on that point. What we have to do is to lessen the area of guess-work, and close open questions, not leave them open. The blank or open mind means confusion and weakness. A man thinks the more effectively the more definite knowledge he possesses, not the less he possesses.

An atheist, or anybody else, who cannot see the difference between prizes and bribes, needs to go back to school himself. A bribe is a gift to influence others unduly in order to persuade them to do something wrong. A prize is a reward in recognition of merit. The honor of winning the Davis Cup is a prize, not a bribe, offered as an incentive to tennis players. At school, prizes as an incentive to application to the study of religion are as appropriate as prizes for similar application in the study of literature, geography, history or any other subject.

Firstly, he would not support that principle in any other subject except that of religion. Why should religion be left untaught, but no other subject? Secondly, where is the advantage in discovering only in one's manhood—if one does—the religious truth which should have been influencing one's earlier years? Many a convert to the Catholic Church has said to me: "I wish to God I had known in my younger days what I know now. Catholics do not always realize how fortunate they are in having been taught their Catholic religion from childhood." Thirdly, when God reveals the true religion through Christ our Lord, He no longer leaves men morally free to please themselves as to whether they will accept it or not. Since such moral freedom does not exist, children ought not to be left to grow to manhood and then to please themselves.

An atheist, who has no idea of what the Catholic religion really is, may talk like that. And as an atheist, of course, his hope is* that such children would choose no religion. But we Catholics know better. We know that the truth has been revealed by God through Christ, who in turn commissioned the Catholic Church to teach it to all nations. It is for us to accept that truth. And the Catholic child, as he is taught his « religion, recognizes its truth by the very principles of faith and grace that were given him in his baptism. And his life-long decision to be true to that religion does not leave him in the position of one still needing to decide what religion he will adopt, if any. It is for the atheist to go on searching.

Catholics certainly want their children brought up with sound moral ideals. But they have a higher motive even than that for wanting the Catholic religion taught to their children. They want it taught because it is the truth revealed by God.

To a limited extent, moral convictions are possible without religious faith. There is a natural moral law discernible by human reason; and conscience, declaring that good must be done and evil must be avoided, is part of every man's make-up whether he pays attention to it or not. But merely natural morality and its ethical demands are quite inadequate for a Christian. In addition to the natural moral virtues, the Christian must ; have the supernatural and God-given virtues of faith and hope and charity, i Moreover, these supernatural virtues must lift the merely natural virtues J to a higher level, so transforming them that they become different not ; only in degree but in kind. They, too, must derive their significance from our relationships with God and not only from our relationships with our fellow human beings'. Christian morality, therefore, differs from merely natural morality, and is dependent upon religious faith.

We can recognize moral values of a kind without belief in God; but not moral values of the kind required of Christians. As for the recognition Of their claims upon us, that recognition becomes less and less efficacious as men grow out of tlTE idea of a moral law imposed by God. The more secularized a society becomes, without belief in God, hope in God, or love of God, the more it tends to abandon the conviction that morality is binding and objective, even though it does not suddenly reject all the ethical principles previously held on religious grounds. And it is a simple fact that the moral aspirations taught in the name of independent and nonreligious ethics have not inspired anything like the same intensity of devotion found among those who believe in a holy and personal God whom they have felt constrained to love and serve.

True. But that is no reason why a Christian child should not be taught that it ought to be good, why it should be good, and how it can be good in a Christian way.

To frighten a child by fear of punishment or to cajole him by hope of a reward are not the only alternatives open to those who teach religious motives. Christianity stands first and foremost for the love of God and love of all that God loves - a love which, as St. Paul says, casts out fear, and which of its very nature rises above all mercenary motives. The Catholic Church teaches, and will continue to teach, that God is holy and therefore loves what is good and hates what is evil; that He is not to be mocked with impunity; and that He will bestow a special love and the richest heavenly blessings on those who try to be good as He is good. Christ Himself bids us: "Be glad and rejoice, for your reward will be very great in Heaven." Matt. V, 12. To work for the reward with no love of God would, of course, be simply self-love and would not lead to the reward in any case. But it is a very different thing to love God for His own sake, to serve Him because we love Him, and be happy also in the thought of His future goodness to us. Certainly it is no tribute to God to despise all that He tells us He has prepared for those who love and serve Him.

Let me ask you two questions. Is it better for professing Christians to be faithful to their duty of public worship offered to God, or not? A recent Gallup Poll showed that more Catholics attend their Church regularly here in Australia than all Protestants taken together. That surely shows that religious schools are better at turning out people faithful to their religious duties than are the public schools. Now for my second question. If there is no evidence that better people come from religious schools than from public schools, why do Protestant Church leaders declare the secular school system defective; complain that they are at a disadvantage compared with the Catholic Church by not having their own religious schools in which to train their children?

You do not say of what nature the private schools were that you attended. However, the value of your judgment would really depend on how you would define the word "better." If you are thinking only in terms of natural goodness and virtue, I am willing to let that go, though without granting it. But you claim to be a Christian, and a Christian is not allowed to think in terms of merely natural goodness and virtue. The New Testament conception of a moral life is derived from and is dependent upon one's spiritual relationships with God. There is an immense difference, not only between good and evil, but also between good and good. There has to be a spiritual quality about the goodness of a Christian You do not say of what nature the private schools were that you attended. However, the value of your judgment would really depend on goodness of the good pagan. This aspect of the subject I am sure you have completely overlooked.

I certainly would not have to say all of them! Your puritanical ideas include a whole lot of things genuine Christian standards do not demand at all. As regards the things Christian standards do demand, I can and do say that a greater proportion of Catholics educated in Catholic schools conform to them than the proportion of children educated in the public schools. But further discussion of this subject would be fruitless until after we have arrived at agreement as to what are the really typical Christian moral and spiritual standards.

Even were Catholic countries deficient in such a way, the claim of the Catholic Church to be the true Church would in no way be affected. Christ established His Church to teach people new standards of conduct and motive, not to teach them how to read and write. Literacy is a secular, not a religious accomplishment. And if people have not Christian standards, literacy can be a curse instead of a blessing. Writing has been abused in a flood of books and papers which had far better never have been written; and the reading of them has caused immense harm to souls. Ability to read and write is all right in its place; but it is good or bad according to the use to which it is put. And, in itself, it has nothing specifically to do with Christianity. Any supposed argument against the Catholic Church based on such lines is conceived in ignorance and born of prejudice. If I deal at some length with the matter, it is not because the statistics you send concerning illiteracy provide a worth - while argument against the truth of the Catholic Church, but because very many Protestant people are simple enough to think that they do.

It is a fallacy to base a religious argument on comparative statistics of illiteracy. One might just as well compare the highly developed culture of the Greek pagans with the backwardness of the Jews in the centuries before Christ and conclude that the paganism of the Greeks must have been right and the religion of the Jews wrong. No Protestant would think of doing that! Again, purely natural factors account for the growth of general education in the northern European countries as compared with the southern countries. With their resources of coal and iron, the northern countries became the industrial countries, with a consequent greater urbanization than occurred in the southern countries, which remained mainly agricultural with a dispersed population. Educational facilities are greater where populations are more centralized. Thirdly, how little necessary connection there is between Protestantism and literacy should be evident from the fact that in so-called Protestant countries almost in proportion to the growth of literacy people have drifted from the Protestant Churches. People have become literate and irreligious.. And the problem for Protestantism today is to stem the tide of unbelief and irreligion amongst its adherents. One could well argue that, far from Protestantism causing literacy, literacy is proving the death of Protestantism!

Your very statement strangely overlooks the fact that the European civilization inherited by Protestants was built up through the centuries by generations of people who professed the Catholic Faith! In any case, it is not notorious to well-informed people that Catholic countries are the most backward educationally. People who confuse illiteracy with lack of education do not know what education means. Education is a very different thing from mere ability to read and write. The farmer, who has little literary knowledge, but who is a successful and expert agriculturist, is better educated than a literary ne'er-do-well. Education is a relative matter, and only a fool takes one small aspect of education, thinks it the whole of education, and makes wild and sweeping statements accordingly. Even from the viewpoint of illiteracy, Catholic countries are not the most backward. In Europe, compared with Italy's 19% illiteracy, Spain's 31%, and Portugal's 31%, Bulgaria has 65%, Greece 57%, Rumania 60%, Russia 60% and Serbia 75%. Religiously these all belong to the Greek Orthodox, not to the Catholic Church. Their religion, of course, has nothing to do with their illiteracy. But sensible people know that such statistics have no real bearing on the subject of religion.

True. But, firstly, you began with the assumption that the Catholic Church has dominated the educational policy of Italy. And that is not true. From the days of Garibaldi, in 1870, the Church was consistently excluded from the control of educational policy. Religion was banished from the schools. And even after the Concordat with Mussolini in 1929, even though religion may be taught, the control of education has remained in the hands of the State. Secondly, even the anticlerical Governments which divorced religion from education in Italy could not be expected, with an agricultural and dispersed population, to compete with industrial countries where there was a greater centralization of people. Thirdly, throughout the centuries when the Church was dominant and precisely when the country was most Catholic, Italy made immense contributions to civilization and the intellectual wealth of the world. Men still go back to Italy in her most Catholic periods to learn architecture and sculpture, music and painting and literature. Dante and Michaelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and a Fra Angelico, and a host of other great names belong to Catholic Italy. As I remarked earlier, the idea that to be a Catholic is to be backward is conceived in ignorance and born of prejudice. And the only real answer to such arguments as those with which I am now dealing is to educate those who propose them. It is useless to give brief replies to people who have not the mental background necessary to appreciate their significance.

The Catholic Church cannot be said to have dominated the educational policies of those two countries during the past century. For the most part, anticlerical Governments were in office right up to the conclusion of the civil war in 1936, and the educational work of the Church was largely crippled, However, things would probably not have been much different from the viewpoint of illiteracy even had the Church had unlettered control. Much the same must be said of natural conditions in Spain and Portugal as of Italy. Lacking the natural resources of the industrial countries, for which the Catholic religion is certainly not to blame, the people have lived mainly an agricultural life. They do not lack education which, as I must point out once more, must not be confused with literacy. The Spaniards are expert farmers, vintagers, orchardists and stock breeders, despite their financial inability and even their lack of desire to introduce the methods of the modern machine age. They naturally have not the wealth of the industrial countries, with an immense inter' national trade, making possible all the latest improvements wealthier countries can afford. But that has nothing to do with religion, any more than the natural resources exploited by the northern European countries were due to Protestantism. In any case, common sense should tell you that the fluctuations of temporal adversity and prosperity cannot affect the truth of any religion as such. Spain and Portugal were Catholic countries when they were the leading nations of the world, making immense contributions to European civilization. They did not find it necessary to abandon their Catholic religion in order to do that. They were the discoverers and explorers of the New World, British and Dutch Protestants following in their wake. In literature and art, music and painting and architecture, just as is true of the Italians, they created a culture only the uneducated can deny. In his articles of "The Inside Story of Spain," the British Ambassador Lord Templewood wrote: "Before I became Ambassador, I knew neither Spain nor Spanish. Spanish history and literature I had never studied. Spanish art I only knew through the meager examples of Spanish painting and sculpt ure in the galleries outside Spain. My mission therefore opened to me a new world of boundless wealth."

That has nothing whatever to do with the truth or otherwise of the Catholic religion, with which problem alone I am really concerned. However, to discuss your present statement, it is a remarkable thing that 33% of the population of Brazil is literate, When the Portuguese went to Brazil they did not set out to destroy the native inhabitants as we British did in Australia. The Indian tribes remained and were incorporated in the population, of which they form an overwhelming proportion. The Portuguese taught these Indians the Catholic religion. But it was another matter to lift them to standards of European civilization. It takes centuries to civilize primitive peoples. At the time of the Protestant Reformation in Europe, the first Protestants were born into a civilization built up during 16 centuries and provided for them by Catholics. The primitive Indians of Brazil had not such a good start. Yet the natives of Brazil have done much better under the Catholic Portuguese than the South African natives under British Protestant domination, and better still than the people of British-ruled India where illiteracy is over 90%. But all this is quite outside the field of religion, and cannot be regarded as even remotely having anything to do with the question of the truth of the Catholic religion. As I remarked earlier, I am not dealing with the subject because it has any real religious significance, but only because some simple people imagine that it has.

Much that I have said of Brazil applies also to Mexico - only more so. There, too, one finds a large percentage of primitive Indians. Moreover, Freemasonry and anticlericalism have kept the country in a state of constant political disturbance, and have legislated against the work of the Catholic Church, suppressing her teaching Orders and closing her schools. The Catholic Church is certainly not to blame for illiteracy in Mexico! And once more, even were the illiteracy there the responsibility of the ecclesiastical authorities, it would in no way disprove the truth of the Catholic Church.

Those are small and compact countries with consequent facilities for general education; and they have natural resources and more wealth proportionately than the less favored southern European states. Their low percentage of illiteracy is in no way due to their Protestantism, even as illiteracy figures themselves are not a reliable test of education in the full sense of that word, nor of a nation's contribution to civilization. Nations with a higher illiteracy percentage amongst a rural population have often contributed more to the intellectual and cultural wealth of the world than nations with lower illiteracy figures. The Danish, Swedish and Swiss peoples have not made anything like the contribution to civilization proportionately to that made by the Catholic Italian, Spanish and Portuguese peoples.

Hitherto I have not bothered challenging your figures, because the matter is really irrelevant. But your inaccuracy is too glaring here. The 6ver-all illiteracy figures for Canada, as given in the Encyclopaedia Britannica" (1947 Edition) are 9.7 per cent males, 8.7 per cent females. The figures given for the United States are 6 per cent males, 5.9 per cent females. But letting that go, whatever the illiteracy figures for Canada, no religious conclusions at all can rightly be drawn from the comparison you make. Nor, as I have repeatedly pointed out, must illiteracy be confused with lack of education. Education covers a thousand things over and above, mere ability to read or write, in matters of practical skill and personal character. I am not saying that it is better to be illiterate than to be literate; although for some individuals it would have been better so. There are many literate people who cannot be called truly educated. No truly educated person would want to argue from relative statistics of illiteracy to the intrinsic truth or falsity of the religions of the peoples concerned. One might as well say that atheism is right and Christianity false because some individual atheist happens to be literate whilst some individual Christian happens to be illiterate! As a matter of fact, quite natural factors account for French-speaking and English-speaking Canadians being educated to a great extent along different lines; the French as descendants of the early colonists inheriting other traditions than the later British migrants from England. One remark may be added, a remark your type of argument invites. From the viewpoint of education in the full sense of the word, Catholic Canadians are in general better educated than Protestant Canadians. They have been educated for better things.

And you really think that an argument against the truth of the Catholic Church! A 2,000 years old Church does not suddenly become false because Protestants in Ontario happen to borrow more books from their libraries in 1954 than Catholics do in Quebec! But even so, there are a few questions to ask about this book-reading business. The first thing to note is that education does not depend upon the number of books one reads. Quality, not quantity, is most important here. The voracious reader who feels that he must keep up with the latest trash that is published, gaining from all his reading a hotch-potch of muddled ideas, is worse off than one who reads fewer and better books. Have you checked up the kind of books read by Protestants in Ontario as compared with the kind of books read by Catholics in Quebec? The next thing is to ask why Protestants in Ontario borrow a greater quantity of books from their libraries than Catholics in Quebec. I'll offer you a reason. The severe winter months in Ontario and Quebec tend to keep people at home in the evenings. What are they to do? French Canadians have been educated in the moral law. They do not believe in contraception or abortion. They have a healthy family life, with many children. There is no loneliness and boredom in such families. In Ontario, birthcontrol and abortions are destroying family life. Childless couples turn to reading, making books a substitute for babies. Lest you think I am exaggerating, the annual increase of Protestants in Ontario, even with the help of immigration, is only half the annual increase of Catholics in Quebec without the help of immigration. So pronounced was the contrast that, on June 8, 1944, the Toronto "Globe and Mail" complained in an editorial that taxes for family allowances paid by Protestants in Ontario were mostly distributed to Catholic families in Quebec! The following week, the same paper complained that if the birth-rate amongst Protestants in Ontario goes on declining, their parliamentary representation will diminish and they will end up governed by Catholics. Is it any wonder, then, that more reading is done in the lonely homes of Ontario Protestants than amongst the Catholics of Quebec, kept busy with a houseful of children? And you ask me to reconcile the truth of the Catholic Church with the fact that Protestants in Ontario, because they have less babies, find time to read more books than Catholics in Quebec! But that is enough of this foolish argument based on what is imagined to be the educational backwardness of Catholics under the destructive influence of their religion.

The Catholic Church established all the older Universities of Europe in the first place. But you have in mind, in your queries, modern neutral or non-religious Universities.

If it does not do more than that it is not strictly-speaking a "University." It is no more than a technical college. A University ought to give, not only a particular training for a particular profession, but also a universal outlook on life. Men and women should graduate from a University, not only aware of their purely sectional interests, but aware also of the relation of their work to the life of society as a whole and the needs of human existence in its totality.

Catholics think otherwise. They do not hold a University exists to teach religion only. But they know that religion is integral to a complete human life, and that it should have its due place in a University curriculum. But even if your secular University does not exist to teach religion, it does not exist to teach irreligion. If it teaches a philosophy at all, it should at least be impartial, giving a sound knowledge of all the philosophies with particular reference to the philosophy which has been the greatest force in building up our own civilization. By that I mean the Christian philosophy. Even if a professor did not believe in the Christian philosophy of life, he could at least try to do it justice and point out its significance.. But many professors in our secular Universities are not impartial. They stress the views of secularists, and mention Christian views only to distort them and belittle them. Not all do this, of course. But those with a Christian outlook do not take advantage of their position to propagate their views, whilst the secularists lose no opportunity of airing their contempt for Christianity. The resultant effect upon impressionable students is evident. Many have gone to our secular Universities with the Christian faith and have come away without it. I have yet to hear of any student who has gained the Christian faith by attending them, or had his faith in any way strengthened by doing so.

We can at least expect even the modern secular University not to attack that code. Yet professors have done so; and the students have not been slow to exhibit the results in practice. The fruits of secularism in University education are every bit as harmful as in primary education. The result in the field of behavior, were there no other counter-acting influences, could only be spiritual and moral chaos infecting the whole of society. Secularism is one of the most dangerous weapons to be found in the armory of the devil himself. Out of that Pandora's Box of unbelief have come murders, adulteries, perjury, dishonesties, hatreds, greed, and every other kind of evil thing.

It cannot really do so. Man is a moral being; and his conduct will be moral or immoral according to the principles he holds. Teach him no beliefs, and his moral life will go to pieces. Teach him a wrong theory of life, and his moral conduct will be evil also. A French author, Paul Bourget, wrote a book called "The Disciple." It describes an inoffensive University professor who would not hurt a fly, yet who found himself called as a witness in a murder case involving one of his own pupils who had absorbed his teachings and put them into practice. In that pupil abstract teaching had become actual reality. The same thing is appearing on a gigantic scale in our own times. Secularism may have seemed as harmless and remote as Bourget's professor from tragedy. It merely said that God and religion did not matter and that the only reality was the world of material things. Today secularism is sweeping away the ten commandments of God, making honesty and purity out-of-date, causing contracts, private and public, national and international to be explained away, and destroying civil and religious liberty. Yet we go on with our secular education in schools and universities, de-Christianizing our democracies and fondly persuading ourselves that our civilization will survive whilst being corrupted by ourselves from within. The only remedy is the return of more and more individuals amongst us to the Christian religion in belief and practice.

There must be some limitations on public utterances, no matter by whom they are made. No reasonable person could agree that an absolute right to free speech may be granted to anybody. As the community cannot grant to everyone the right to do as he likes, so it cannot grant to everyone the right to say what he pleases. Or are we to hold that a man's actions may do harm to others, but that his words cannot? Words can easily pervert a man's mind, sow the fatal seeds of evil in his intelligence and heart, ruin his whole life, and lead to great injury to society.

A University professor should have the same freedom of speech within reasonable limits as any other citizen to advocate his views on various subjects outside the University. But when fulfilling his duties within the University his position does impose upon him certain additional limitations. He should teach there what he is appointed to teach, impartially and objectively. If a professor says that he is an atheist and that his subject is philosophy which he cannot teach without impressing upon the students his own atheism, then the citizens of a Christian community certainly have the right to demand a more suitable professor of philosophy who can teach the subject without a bias towards atheism. There are plenty of such professors available, and there is no reason why University students who wish to take philosophy as a subject should have to be taught it by an atheist who cannot resist making use of his position to undermine the beliefs of his students. Academic freedom does not require such an unlimited scope for any and every kind of propaganda.

Sooner or later those who are so ready to denounce the dogmatic teaching-authority of the Catholic Church in religious and moral matters end by falling back on authority themselves. But is it true that students are impressed by the authority of a professor because he has made a more careful and critical study of his subject and of related subjects?. Is it not rather true that they merely think he must have done so? They are not in a position to judge whether he has done so or not. They just take that for granted and concede him authority because he is a University professor. And he decides what are the related subjects upon which he expects his authority to be accepted as well as on his own proper subject. Again and again we have had examples of utterances on religion by professors of philosophy in secular Universities which give no sign of a careful and critical study of religion, but which have obviously been dictated by anti-religious prejudice.

There is no religion which will not benefit by a legitimate, dignified and reverent critical study on the part of competent scholars; and the Catholic Church has ever encouraged such study. Nor is there any need to have extravagant ideas of the extent of infallibility claimed by the Catholic Church. The Catholic religion undoubtedly imposes upon its adherents a body of doctrines to be accepted as infallibly true, and to be believed on the authority of God who revealed them. These doctrines or dogmas are not open to criticism in the sense of doubting them until our investigations have proved them to our own satisfaction, though one may study them as deeply as he wishes, trying to penetrate ever more profoundly into their significance. The Catholic religion, however, contains more than its defined dogmas. The Catholic Church is a human as well as a divine institution. She has her human traditions, and she does not hold that all her members, even her greatest scholars, are infallible in their thinking and writing. From this aspect there is room for critical study. Some human traditions may be proved ill-founded. Eminent Catholic scholars may be shown to have misunderstood the sense of what God has revealed and to have fallen into error. But whilst there is ample scope within the Catholic religion for constant critical study, the defined dogmas of the Catholic Faith are not open to doubt of any kind, and they have to be believed with unwavering faith in God's knowledge and veracity. The claim of the Catholic Church to be infallible in declaring these dogmas can be made good for anyone accepting the New Testament and believing in the Divinity of Christ.

We Catholics certainly believe that obedience to the Laws of God includes obedience to the laws of the Church Christ established to guide us in the name of God.

There is all the difference in the world between the position of the Catholic Church and that of a totalitarian government in the sense you have in mind. Every government is of course authoritarian, for if it had: no authority it would not be a government. But the totalitarian rule of the Absolute State ignores the moral law altogether, regiments citizens as it pleases, and deprives o! physical liberty those who do not obey orders, whatever they may be, like slaves. The Catholic Church, however, upholds the moral law and does not rely upon physical force to secure its observance. The only obedience she can expect is the voluntary obedience of those who have faith in the Catholic religion. The Catholic who feels that he ought to obey the directions of his Church in religious and moral matters knows that he is physically free to disobey without any deprivation of his civic liberty. Inability to see a difference between that and the political despotism of a totalitarian State can only be due to want of sufficient thought.

Where basic moral principles are concerned God has not changed, nor will the Catholic Church, She Still calls sin what it really is—sin. At one time, moral laws wire broken, but riot denied. Nowadays more and more widely the very laws are denied. Vice is becoming not only respectable, but even regarded aS virtue! What was called immorality is now to be morality, But all who are on the side of genuine morality must surely regard it as a credit to the Catholic Church that she refuses to conform to the growing modern laxity.

Moral philosophy is the science which investigates our judgments of right and wrong, good or bad, in the field of conduct, whether personal Or social, in order to discover what ought or ought not to be done, if we ire to live reasonably and well.

Requirements would differ in different Universities. All Universities would require that an applicant for such a position should himself have received a University training, and that he had specialized in moral philosophy either during or after his course of studies. A Catholic University would require its professor to hold and teach Christian ethical principles as true, explaining other systems of morality from an historical point of view for purposes of general knowledge and of mental training in comparative philosophies. A secular or non-religious University would not concern itself with the personal views of its professors, but would expect them to give a good general survey of the main systems of moral philosophy, leaving it to themselves to impress upon the students the opinions they believed to be more probably correct.

A law is an appointed rule imposing a certain kind of action. We speak of the physical laws of the universe, such as that of gravitation. In social life there are positive laws enacted by human authorities for the gommon good. Now a moral law is one which a rational human being experiences as a sense of obligation within his conscience. If he neglects to do what it tells him he ought to do, or if he does what it tells him he ought not to do, he experiences a guilty sense of violation of duty; and this is quite independent of whether his fellow human beings know about it or not.

Knowledge of natural physical laws is got by reasonable deduction based on physical observation and experiment. In the physical order we study the activities of things around us. In the moral order, however, we observe human behavior and analyze human experience. We ask what conduct is in accordance with our rational moral nature, and what is a violation of it. The former is good, and it is the natural moral law that we should behave in such a way; the latter is evil, and it is the natural moral law that we avoid such conduct.

No. Reason alone would be enough to establish its existence. Ancient Greek and Roman philosophers argued that the existence of the human conscience proves man's moral nature, and that that in turn proves the existence of the natural moral law. The German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, taught the same thing in our own times by his doctrine of what he called the "Categorical Imperative"; that is, man's innate conviction that he is morally obliged to conform to standards of behavior not of his own making, but imposed upon him by the very nature he has been given.

By "positive laws only" he meant legislation made by any men who happened to be in power just because they are in power. This theory supposes that there is no higher law anywhere to which all men are subject, even rulers. Granted such a theory men in power could impose any laws they pleased upon others. Might would be right. On the other hand, by "natural law" Dr. Adler meant the Will of the Creator who has not only endowed man with a certain nature but obliges him in conscience to live in accordance with natural moral principles of justice. This means that there are certain rights and duties not originated by men themselves, which men cannot abolish, and which all are obliged to observe. Might is not right, but must be subordinated to what is right and used only to maintain and defend it.

Cicero, who died in 43 B.C. and knew nothing of the Christian religion, gives in his "De Republica," III, 22, a definition of it as right reason in agreement with nature. Here are his words: "True law is right reason in agreement with nature. It is of universal application, unchanging, everlasting. It is a sin to try to alter this law; and it is impossible to abolish it entirely. We cannot be freed from it by Senate or people; and we need not look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it. This law is not one thing at Rome and another at Athens, but is eternal and immutable, valid for all nations and for all times. God is the Author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge. Whoever is disobedient to it is fleeing from his true self and denying his own nature." Thus wrote Cicero. Each creature in the universe has been given its own nature by the Creator, in accordance with which it is intended to live. Brute animals are impelled to do so by the instincts the Creator has implanted in them. But men, endowed with reason and free will, are moral beings who are obliged voluntarily to conform their lives to the natural law of God as manifested by their own intelligence and enforced by conscience. It should be clear from this that if there were positive laws only, for which men are answerable only to themselves, then any law would be as good as any other law, provided those in authority chose to enact it; justice would be non-existent; ind talk of human rights as opposed to brute force would be meaningless. If, however, there be a natural moral law appointed by the Creator of mankind, the case is very different.

Every man can know that there is a natural moral law which men should observe. One does not have to be a Christian to know that. But whilst all men can know that such a law exists, not everyone is equally able to see all its implications. Understanding of the range and of the various applications of the natural moral law will vary according to the degree of ability and the amount of time devoted to the study of the subject.

Here are two principles of that law which everybody who has come to the use of reason can know. Firstly, there is an obligation to do good and avoid what is wrong and evil. Secondly, since reason is man's highest power, he should behave in accordance with reason and not allow blind and lower passions to lead him into unreasonable conduct. Whilst, however, all people can know these two basic principles, difficulty can arise in deciding what is good and what is evil, or what is reasonable and what is unreasonable, in particular cases. Some things I would say that mOst people could know to be opposed to the natural moral law, if they used their reason as they should are these: to ignore all religious duties to God; to take one's own life by suicide, or that of another by murder; to steal, to tell deliberate lies; to indulge in unchaste actions alone or in promiscuous sex-relations; to violate the just rights of other people. Only those who are wilfully blind, and bent on doing evil, can deny those things to be violations of the natural moral law. 1 . Beyond those matters, however, and in complex situations, the correct application of the natural moral law could probably be discerned only by those of more than ordinary knowledge and wisdom. But the ordinary man would at least know in such circumstances that he ought to consult those better informed than himself.

There is. And any merely empirical, or merely social, or merely psychological basis of ethics is simply left in mid-air, and devoid of any solid foundation without it.

The only sound and ultimate basis is the Will of God, whether known naturally by analysis of the rational nature with which God has endowed man, or known supernaturally by divine revelation.

Because morality of its very nature supposes a duty to do one thing rather than another. If there be no duty, if one ought not to do this or abstain from doing that, then there is neither morality or immorality. The choice would not be a matter of conscience at all. But once we raise the question of duty the problem arises: Duty to whom? In the end we come to the Will of God that the moral law should be observed, or there is no sufficient reason for morality. I cannot here explain and refute all substitute foundations suggested by men who say they want morality without God. I can but state the reason why God must be the ultimate basis— and that means a religious basis—if morality is to stand at all. The same thing holds for sin. Sin is an immoral act. It is defined as any voluntary offense against the Will or Law of God in thought, word, deed or omission. The Law of God, of course, covers duties to Himself personally, duties to ourselves in our own individual conduct, and duties to our neighbors in social conduct. But once the idea of God and the religious basis of ethics are abandoned, the word sin loses its meaning. That is why irreligious men quite logically end by denying that there is any such thing as sin.

That is morally right which is in conformity with the Will of God, The Will of God is manifested in three different ways. Firstly, by the natural moral law. Thus things are right if they are in accordance with the true purpose of our rational human nature. Things are morally wrong if they are opposed to the true good of the rational nature God has given us. Secondly, over and above this natural moral law which a well-trained reason can formulate for itself, God has given us additional laws of conduct by revelation. It is morally right that we should observe these also, and morally wrong to violate them. Thirdly, God has instituted the Catholic Church, giving that Church authority to legislate in His name. Thus Christ said to the Apostles: "Whatsoever you bind on earth shall be bound also in Heaven; and whatsoever you loose on earth shall be loosed also in Heaven." Matt., XVIII, 18. It is morally right, therefore, to obey the Will of God as manifested by the legislation of the Catholic Church; morally wrong to violate it. To justify the claims of the Catholic Church to speak with the authority of God I must refer you to earlier chapters in this book.

That God imposes moral obligations upon us both by the natural moral law and by His positively revealed law is not merely an allegation. There is more than sufficient evidence for the manifestation of divine authority, and it is not so easily swept aside as you imagine. In the meantime, if morality is not based upon the authority of God as the Author of the moral law, then there is no real foundation for morality at all.

Those considerations do not explain why there should be any morality I t0 at all, based on anything. Nor will they pass muster as tests of morality. IL By the time you have defined what you mean by "enlightened humanism" I j| you will find multitudes who regard it as neither enlightened nor human. | Your talk of an intelligent appreciation that certain actions are anti-social j invites the retort that morality often demands the stand of an individual | against what may be socially expedient. Expediency, whether individual or social, is no necessary indication of what is morally right. Nor is the | health of an individual or of a nation a reliable test of morality, as if that only was morally wrong which is deleterious to health. As for making the "ungentlemanly" the test of what is morally wrong, you there appeal to variable conventions which can afford no sound guidance as to what is or is not right in itself. According to the accepted standards of a cannibal tribe, it might not be in the least "ungentlemanly" to murder and ! eat your rival in love. Yet objectively such conduct is not morally justifiable. Those who reject the authority of God cannot explain the fact of moral obligation experienced by men; they cannot give any sound reason why men should heed their'sense of moral obligation; and they cannot declare with any certainty what should be regarded as morally right or morally wrong. The logical result of ethics without God is simply the absence of morals.

Social relationships are not the basis of morality. They afford one field in which morality must be exercised. The basis of morality must be sought elsewhere. And it is to be found in the natural moral law antecedent to all social organization—a natural law which is the Will of God for man both as an individual and as a social being. Without that basis there is no sound foundation for morality at all, and the suggestion that a man ought to be moral is meaningless.

Social relations are the outcome of the need of living, in so far man's very nature impels him not only to live but to live as a social being. Man did not give himself that nature. He was given it by the God who made him. But besides this physical and psychological law of our being, God has imposed a moral law, manifested by conscience and dictating proper behavior in our personal lives and in our social relationships. Proper social relationships are the outcome of the moral sense, which is therefore antecedent to social relationships of its very nature. The ultimate criterion of moral conduct cannot be merely social expediency. Were it so it would be quite moral for a man to murder his aging parents as sdon as he decided that they were no longer of use to society.

Surely you can see the falsity of that. For society is merely a multitude of human beings. Morality cannot be based on the mere fact of multitude. It is based on the fact that human beings make up that multitude. And it is due to the human nature possessed by each of the individuals concerned.

Do you really mean that such an isolated individual would be subject to no moral law at all, and that nothing he did or omitted to do would be virtuous or vicious, morally right or morally wrong? You would probably not be impressed by my referring to any religious duties to God, though I maintain that he would be obliged to fulfill those. But what of the, moral law dictating duties towards his own rational nature? It would be immoral for your isolated individual to take his own life by suicide. But even short of that, would you maintain that it would not be immoral for him to ruin his health by gluttony or drunkenness? Previously you said that conduct deleterious to health would violate morality. Or again, would you admit that your isolated individual could sin by yielding to lust, solitary vice, or even bestiality? Your theories really will not bear rational analysis.

n a sense that is true. But even to speak of ordinary civic and Christian virtues as "old-fashioned" is a sad admission of the moral breakdown in modern society. That moral breakdown has followed upon the driftage from religion and has arisen from it. Dr. Alexis Carrel says, in his book, "Man the Unknown," that unbelief is destroying civilization. And he Writes: "Unintelligence is becoming more and more widespread in spite of the courses given in the schools, colleges and universities. Strange to say, it often exists with advanced scientific knowledge. The moral sense is almost completely ignored by modern society." That is the fruit of irreligion, fostered by only too many agnostic university professors.

A school of ethical research should examine the teachings of modern critical philosophy, expose its moral bankruptcy and its logical fallacies, and establish sound principles of moral science. There is no reason why we should uncritically accept the verdict of destructive modern philosophers who happen to be popular in a degenerate age. Such a school should establish the truth that not hedonism, or pleasure-seeking; not utilitarianism, or mere expediency; but the right, the honest and the good as approved by right reason, constitute the true and natural criterion of moral conduct. And it should refute the nonsense that sound moral philosophy is necessarily or in any way opposed to the Christian religion.

That could possibly be admitted as regards the revealed law of God; but I do not think total ignorance of the natural moral law could be admitted. Every human being has at least a natural conscience and is made conscious in some things that he is violating the moral law, however inadequate may be his knowledge of all that should be classed as immoral.

If the Pope meant merely that men are losing their sensitiveness to sin, so that they just do not care whether a thing be right or wrong, it would not follow that men could not distinguish between right and wrong. In that case they could, but would not bother trying to do so; and that would mean bad faith on their part. If, however, the Pope meant that men are losing their knowledge of what is right and wrong, then in the degree in which people do lose that knowledge they would be unable to distinguish between right and wrong. But the Pope's words certainly do not mean that people are entirely without such knowledge.

That would follow if it were through no fault of their own that they were unable to distinguish between right and wrong. It would not follow, if they themselves were to blame for arriving at such a state. There is such a thing as guilty ignorance. People cannot escape responsibility for their actions against the moral law on the plea that they did not know their actions to be morally wrong if the moral law was one which they could have known and should have known. If they do not know such actions to be morally wrong, it is because they have deliberately chosen to be ignorant lest knowledge of the law should interfere with what, in their bad will, they have determined to do. That this is blameworthy before God is evident from Holy Scripture which declares: "Woe to you that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter." Is., V, 20.

Some professors of philosophy who have no faith may be antagonistic towards it; but genuine philosophy is not. The methods of philosophy and faith differ, in so far as philosophy requires the demonstration of its conclusions by reason whilst faith accepts what God reveals because God has revealed it. But reason and faith are in no way antagonistic. They complete each other. In fact, without the help of revelation, fallible human reason often goes astray in its own field; and it is always inadequate without religion which directly relates us to the God who made us. The subject matter of ethics, therefore, is common both to philosophy and religion, the one contributing truth as discovered by reason, the other contributing truth as made known by revelation.

God's laws are known, either by a study of the natural moral law, or by a study of divine revelation. All laws apart from those could be called man-made laws. But man-made laws can indirectly be God's laws also, in so far as God Himself sanctions the authority of human legislation within its own proper limits. Thus, indirectly, children obey God's law when they obey their parents in the home; citizens when they obey civil authorities in social life. If, however, any human being commands us to do what we know God positively forbids, then we have a man-made law which has no authority and which we are bound to ignore. In such cases we must obey God rather than man.

The Catholic Church certainly teaches that our first parents sinned against God's express commands, and earned for themselves and their posterity a legacy of inherent unruliness and disorder. This doctrine of inherited original sin means that we are a guilty race, needing redemption, and constantly needing the help of divine grace if we are to overcome the additional difficulties our warped human nature finds in its efforts to observe the moral law.

Religion - Yes or No

The Christian Church

"This Shall Be the Sign"

Dogmatic Authority of the Church

The Power-Complex Illusion

Life-Or-Death Social Problems

Those Exclusive Claims

Religious Liberty

Are Only Catholics Saved

Catholic Apologetics in Question & Answer Form

Religion - Yes or No

The Christian Church

"This Shall Be the Sign"

Dogmatic Authority of the Church

The Power-Complex Illusion

Life-Or-Death Social Problems

Those Exclusive Claims

Religious Liberty

Are Only Catholics Saved

QUESTIONS IN VOLUME 4

501. It would not be so bad if teachers explained to children that God, being good, necessarily wills what is good; and that they themselves therefore must decide which actions are good ones and which are bad ones, and do the good ones.

502. As it is, the child becomes conscious of God as a policeman he cannot dodge.

503. Religion only breeds intolerance. Christian dogmatists themselves, even whilst saying that Christian ethics teach charity and sympathy, are never tired of denouncing those who advocate secular education only.

504. Paul Blanshard shows in his book, "Communism, Democracy and Catholic Power," that the imposition of any creed (whether it be Communism or Catholicism) is very useful to the ruling order in any society.

505. Religious discipline is commonly allied with patriotic discipline.

506. The enforcing of discipline is, therefore, the function of the Catholic religion in education.

507. Your religion of dogma accordingly spreads the habit of submission, which induces people to accept authority without questioning.

508. This is why religious training in religious schools can easily result in political exploitation.

509. The teaching of religion must have an important politico character because it promotes an extension of credulity, which is a very desirable thing from the point of view of the ruling order.

510. Have you ever thought of how great an evil it is for you to have your separate religious schools in this country, where we are all Americans, in order to keep people religiously divided?

511. Protestants do not attack the right of Catholics to be Catholics. They object only to Catholic schools because they further divide the people.

512. Recently Protestant leaders in Australia said that they were content with the purely secular system of government schools there; yet that Roman Catholics insisted on maintaining their own separate religious schools there. Why could not Roman Catholics be equally content?

513. Is it because you are afraid Catholics will grow out of their Romish superstitions if they are not being constantly told about them?

514. You have repeatedly said that secularism is the great danger to this country from within.

515. You attribute that to our system of secular education.

516. Why have people who were Christians turned to secularism?

517. At a recent Methodist Rally in the Sydney Town Hall the Rev A. E. Vogt said that hundreds of thousands of Australians have "walked out on God."

518. He said that many would oppose Communism, not on religious grounds in which they are not interested, but only on economic and political grounds.

519. Did not Mr. Sanders, the elected member for Willoughby, denounce you some time ago in the Parliament of N.S.W., declaring that your statements on the State educational system cast a reflection on the morals of all the scholars who had attended them?

520. You said that the increase in juvenile delinquency was not to be wondered at, as no moral code was taught in the State schools.

521. What right have you to say such things?

522. Why was a secular system of education adopted at all?

523. Since secularism is so disastrous, ought not the teaching of religion to be introduced into the State schools?

524. Surely people should wake up to the fact that the teaching of religion is a matter of ordinary prudence.

525. Is not the character of the citizens in any country of supreme importance?

527. Could it not be taught as a subject just like other subjects?

528. It would not be necessary for teachers who taught religion to believe in it themselves.

529. A University professor of philosophy said recently that if Protestant agitation to get religion taught in our public schools were successful, then religion should be taught in a secular manner, divorced from all notions of sacred authority.

530. He said that the idea of "Sacred Books" would have to be rejected, and a general view of all religions would have to be given.

531. He granted that if the Bible were treated as literature, and subjected to criticism as regards literary form and the matter it contains, it could be useful.

532. He said the Gospels should be put before the children as a series of stories of a folk-lore character.

533. He said that a child would get some understanding of ethics by seeing the weakness of Christian morality; of religion by seeing the failure to reconcile the natural and the supernatural; and of science by realizing the absurdity of miracle and prophecy.

534. He added that he felt sure Christian educationalists did not want the kind of religious teaching he advocated, because they wanted instruction rather than education; that is, the child's acceptance of a particular religious creed.

535. They wish Christianity, and it alone, not other religions, to be presented as something beyond question, not as a subject of critical study upon which the child can exercise its own intelligence.

536. It would be difficult to present the Christian religion to school children as the true religion to be accepted by them in any other way than an authoritarian one.

537. It is the Roman Catholic dogmatic attitude to which we object. We do not mind the teaching of religion; but it should be taught as an open question.

538. The ideal is for children to wander freely through the garden of the world's religions, feasting on the beauty and gathering blooms to adorn their minds.

539. Given such freedom, whatever religion they get - and it will be deep and strong - will be their own and not that of their elders.

540. Surely children should be trained to have open minds, and not self-satisfied minds.

541. An atheist told me that in Roman Catholic schools children are bribed by prizes to learn their religion.

542. He said that children should be left to grow to manhood and then to please themselves.

543. He said that Catholic children, left to themselves, might prefer to choose some other religion rather than the Catholic religion.

544. I presume that Roman Catholics insist on the teaching of religion in their schools because they think it the best way to make children moral, and they want their children to be brought up with sound moral ideals.

545. But moral conditions do not depend upon a religious faith.

546. We can recognize moral values and their claims upon us without a dogma telling us of a God imposing them as an obligation.

547. You cannot preach a child into being good.

548. You may indeed frighten him by fear of punishment or cajole him by hope of reward into socially convenient behavior, but that is not making him good.

549. I am a Protestant and claim to be a Christian; and I say that there is no evidence that better people come from religious schools than from the public schools.

550. I myself attended both private schools and the public schools; and the children at the private schools were not a jot better than the others.

552. If the Roman Catholic Church is the true Church and its religious educational policy so successful, why is it that those countries where it dominates the educational system are the most backward educationally and the most illiterate in the civilized world?

553. Let us compare the figures for illiteracy in Roman Catholic and Protestant countries.

554. It is notorious, yet strangely overlooked, that countries where the Roman Catholic Church dominates educational policy are the most backward educationally in the civilized world.

555. In Roman Catholic Italy the percentage of illiteracy is 19%.

556. In Roman Catholic Spain and Portugal illiteracy is 31%.

557. In Roman Catholic Brazil illiteracy is 67%.

558. In Roman Catholic Mexico illiteracy is 59%.

559. As contrasted with all the above countries, Protestant Denmark has only one-sixth of one per cent illiteracy; Protestant Sweden three-fifths of one per cent; and Protestant Switzerland three-tenths of one per cent.

560. Quebec, entirely Roman Catholic, is the most illiterate State in Canada. Taking Canada as a whole, French-speaking Roman Catholics show 6.18 illiterates against British .18.

561. Library circulation in Quebec shows an annual output of 697,400 volumes, against the neighboring Protestant State of Ontario's 13,999,414.

562. Apart from the question of religious schools for children, I would like to raise the problem of university education. Your Church has entered even that field by establishing Catholic Universities.