Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/269

 256 F. WINTER-TON : first sight hard to conceive. It would appear to destroy all the certitude of science, since we may suppose the Church stepping in at every moment, and denying the veracity of scientific experiments : ' This is not an explosion ; that is not a gas ; your analyses are not well made ; your syntheses have led you into error '. Reason itself is overthrown by faith, since faith is in the right when it contradicts reason. And lastly, even religion, left without the basis of rational thought, is utterly annihilated, and nothing is left but an abject superstition, whose formula is : I believe because I believe. If we look a little closer, however, we shall see that things are not quite what they seem. St. Ignatius does not take a contradiction of faith with reason as his example, but a contradiction of the senses -versus faith. He does not say, for instance, that supposing 2 + 2 = 5 were to be decided by a Council, he would have to believe it. Nor is this contradiction of the senses an absolute one. It would be so, if he said : You must believe that what is black is white, if the Church tells you it is ; or : You must believe that what you see to be black you see to ~be white, if the Church decrees it. He does not affirm either of these two contradictions, but only says that what we, see to "be black may "be white ; that is, may not be in itself what it is subjectively as perceived. It may be objected that this is to go quite far enough. So it is ; and indeed I do not see how anyone can go farther without falling into a palpable absurdity. Let it also be remembered that, in the time of St. Ignatius, it must have seemed much more contrary to reason than it really is. We all know now that such a defect as colour-blindness not only may but really does exist, and that there are many instances of a man taking, e.g., red for gray, which means that what he sees to be gray is red. But in the time of St. Ignatius this phenomenon was completely unknown, and the fact seems to render the boldness of his ' rule ' still less excusable. He ought not, however, to be condemned without our noticing one plea in favour of his doctrine viz., that it is thoroughly consistent and logical. No Catholic can, without contradicting his own principles, say one word against Loyola's manner of proceeding : he but formulates clearly and explicitly what every believer in the Eomish Church implicitly submits to. His rule is to believe against the evidence of the senses and, whilst admitting their subjective, to deny their objective infallibility, when their testimony clashes with faith. All Catholics believe in one omni- present God, present, not partially but in totality, in every