Page:Petri Privilegium - Manning.djvu/359

Rh Its first chapter is of God the Creator of all things. In this is decreed the personality, spirituality, and liberty of God, the creation of corporeal and of spiritual beings, and the existence of body and soul in man. These truths may be thought so primary and undeniable as to need no definition. To some it may be hardly credible that, at this day, there should exist men who deny the existence of God, or His personality, or His nature distinct from the world, or the existence of spiritual beings, or the creation of the world, or the liberty of the Divine will in creation. But such errors have existed and do exist, not only in obscure and incoherent minds, but in intellects of power and cultivation, and in philosophies of elaborate subtilty, by which the faith of many has been undermined.

The second Chapter is on Revelation. It affirms the existence of two orders of truth: the order of nature, in which the existence of God as the beginning and end of creatures may be certainly known by the things which He has made; and the order which is above created nature, that is, God and His action by truth and grace upon mankind. The communication of supernatural truth to man is revelation; and that revelation is contained in the Word of God written and unwritten, or in the divine tradition committed to the Church. These truths, elementary and certain as they seem, have been and are denied by errors of a contradictory kind. By some it is denied that God can be known by the light of reason; by others