THE CATHOLIC SOCIAL-REFORM MOVEMENT 1 9
respects — has been committed the guardianship of the whole body of natural and supernatural truth which in any way min- isters to human salvation, whether intrinsically accessible to reason or embodied in the divine revelation first given in Eden, renewed under allegorical veils on Sinai, and reaffirmed and completed in the Cenacle. The Catholic church represents, in the view of its adherents, the regenerated human race ; it is the kingdom of God on earth, the vast fellowship of those who adhere to the divinely established hierarchy, recognize the divine law, and possess the sacred tradition which is the inherit- ance of all the celestial illuminations, ripe thought, and instruct- ive experience of all mankind in all ages.
Human nature, like everything else that exists, is essentially good, but since the fall it is afflicted with a weakness and dis- order which are the source of all moral and social ills. All human ideas and institutions, religious and secular, are either true and good in themselves, or are a perversion, or rudiment, or type of that which possesses those attributes. No race or tribe of men has ever existed, or can ever exist, which does not possess the gift of reason and at least some fragments of divine revela- tion.
As all e.xistence and change is dependent on laws and prin- ciples which, when reduced to their first terms, are found to spring from the very nature of the Divine Being, it follows that all knowledge, of every order and degree, constitutes one corpus, so that the arts are dependent on the sciences, and all the other sciences are dependent on philosophy and theology. It is from theology and philosophy that the first principles of all the sciences are derived, or at least by them alone that these first principles can be verified, correlated, and adequately explained.
If these principles be granted, the conclusion is inevitable that it is only under the segis of the true religion that true and perfect science can flourish in the fullest degree, or that human institutions can attain to their most complete and salutary development. This fact is strikingly illustrated, the representa- tives of the Catholic school assert, in the history of human society.
