schema of the intellectual aberrations of the world outside the Church. But it goes on to say that many Catholics also, by contact with these errors, have lost, if not faith, at least piety and the Catholic instinct which is the legitimate antagonist of indifferentism. From which cause erroneous interpretations of the doctrines of the Church have been introduced, and the orders of nature and of grace, of human science and of divine faith, have been mixed and confounded together. The Constitution then proceeds to treat in four chapters—(1) of God, the Creator of all things; (2) of revelation; (3) of faith; (4) of the relation of faith and reason.
16. It may be asked why, in the nineteenth century of the Christian world, need an Œcumenical Council be convened to define these things? The answer is: Because these things are divine and vital truths, and because they have been denied. For three centuries these foundations of all truth have been undermined by systematic negations, which have now issued in a formal and widespread rejection of all faith. They who ask the question can have little knowledge of the intellectual history or the intellectual state of the so-called Christian world. They are not likely indeed to have much knowledge of the acts of Pius the Ninth, who, through the whole of his pontificate, has been striving to rectify the intellectual aberrations of these
