Page:A Memorial of John Boyle O'Reilly from the City of Boston.djvu/32

26 Rome as the divinely ordained head of that Church, and the ultimate judge in all disputed questions of faith or morals.

He knew the limits of human intelligence, and the fallibility of reason in the domain of religion, and was content to rest his faith on well-authenticated revelation, made through divinely appointed channels. His mind was too sane to rebel against these limitations, and too pious to blame the Creator for not making man perfect. Hence, he was free from that intellectual pride and self-sufficiency which impel some men to try to hew out for themselves a pathway in the mysterious regions of religion, and to invent a way of salvation all their own.

His open profession of faith in the Catholic religion was of great service to the church in this country. It showed once more what has so often been demonstrated, that great mental endowments and intellectual freedom are not incompatible with Catholic faith. The integrity of his life and character, moulded and sustained as they were by the moral precepts of the Catholic religion, helped in some measure to break down that dead wall of prejudice that unhappily divides Catholics from their fellow-citizens of other creeds. Without being learned in scholastic theology, he had a thorough knowledge of the substance of sound doctrine. He had the faculty of discerning the true and detecting the false in matters of doctrine, which is almost an instinct in those born and bred in