Page:The Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII.djvu/477



CHRIST OUR REDEEMER. 471

minds busy with a hundred confused projects, rulers and subjects ahke travel a devious road; bereft, as they are, of safe guidance and fixed principle.

Just as it is pitiable and calamitous to wander out of the way, so it is to desert the truth. But the first abso- lute and essential truth is Christ, the Word of God, con- substantial and co-eternal with the Father, who with the Father is one. / am the Way and the Truth. Accord- ingly, if truth is sought, let human reason first of all obey Jesus Christ and rest secure in His authoritative teaching, because by Christ's voice the truth itself speaks.

Human intelligence has a wide field of its own in which to employ itself freely with investigation and experiment. Nature not only allows this, but evidently requires it. But it is a wicked thing and against nature for the mind to refuse to be confined within its ovn\ Hmitations, to have no proper modesty, and to scorn the authority of Christ's teaching. The doctrine, on w^hich our salvation altogether depends, regards God and divine things. That was not created by any man's -wisdom, but the Son of God received it in its entirety from His Father. The words which Thou gavest Me, I have given them} Accord- ingly, it necessarilj includes much that, without being contrary to reason, for that cannot possibly be, is still beyond the reach of our mind as much as is the compre- hension of God in His essential being. But if there are 6o many things in nature itself which are mysterious and obscure, and which no human intelligence can explain, and yet which no one in his senses would presume to doubt, it will be a perverse freedom of thought not to allow for things existing outside the domain of nature altogether, which are above nature, and beyond our minds to fathom. To refuse to accept dogmas evidently means to do away with the whole Christian religion. The mind must be subjected humbly and submissively to the obedience of


 * John xvii. 8.