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 Proœemium to the First Constitution (as had already been indicated by Pius IX. in his allocutions and also in his encyclical Quanta Cura issued in 1864), the council sketches in a few vivid strokes the chief errors of the age. After noting that these errors have sprung from the rejection of the Church’s teaching authority in the sixteenth century, it points out how opposed they are to the errors of that time: the first Protestants held to “Faith alone” and “Grace alone;” their modern successors believe in nothing but Reason and Nature. “Then there sprang up and too widely spread itself abroad through the world that doctrine of rationalism or naturalism which, totally opposed as it is to the Christian religion as a supernatural institution, striveth with all its might to thrust out Christ from the thoughts and the life of men, and to set up the reign of mere reason or nature. Having put aside the Christian religion and denied God and His Christ, many have at last fallen into the pit of pantheism, materialism, and atheism, so that now, denying rational nature itself and every criterion of what is right and just, they are working together for the overthrow of the foundations of human society. While this wickedness hath been gaining strength on all sides, it hath unhappily come to pass that many even of the Church’s children have strayed from the path of godliness, and that in them, by the gradual minimizing of truths, Catholic feeling hath been weakened. Misled by strange doctrines, confounding nature and grace, human knowledge and Divine Faith, they have distorted the true meanings of dogmas as held and taught by Holy Mother Church, and have imperilled the integrity and purity of the Faith.” Another constitution against Naturalism was projected in which the Trinity, Incarnation, and Grace were to be treated, but it was not issued owing to the suspension of the council. Two more constitutions, on the Church and on Matrimony, were to deal with the social aspect of Rationalism and Naturalism—that is, with Liberalism,—but for the same reason only one of them (that on the Church) was published. See Vacant, Études Théologiques sur le Concile du Vatican.

The leading errors which Theology has to combat are,