Page:Rome and the Revolution - Manning.djvu/13

Rh God has narrowed the liberty of the human intelligence. No man is at liberty to think that there are many Gods, or that there is no God. Polytheism and Atheism are not only follies, but sins. In like manner, by revealing the Incarnation of His Son, God has imposed another limit on the freedom of the human reason. No man is at liberty to say that God is not incarnate. And so of every revealed truth, of the Church, of the Seven Sacraments, as also of every known truth of every kind; the liberty of the human reason to dispute at will is restrained by being elevated to the light of knowledge. Nevertheless men resent this as a bondage.

This, if possible, is still more true of the revealed law of God. The Divine Commandments which require obedience, justice, truth, and purity, are so far limitations of human freedom. Men are not at liberty to violate these laws. They have no right to be disobedient, unjust, untruthful, impure. The will has no right of liberty to infringe these laws at choice. It is this yoke of faith and law, imposed upon the intelligence and the will, that galls and irritates the world.

So, again, the Church is a more explicit object of their enmity, because it is to the Church that God has committed the custody and the execution of His truth and law. The Church—as witness, teacher, and judge—contradicts and offends the spirit of licence to the quick. It will not compromise, it will not be silent, it will not connive, it will not accommodate its doctrines to modern progress, or to the new developments of religious or secular