that in England surprise may be felt at such a decree; but nobody who knows Germany and France and the philosophies of this century will fail to understand the reasons of it, and to see its absolute need. It is here to be noted that the Council does not affirm that men must come, or ordinarily do come, to the knowledge, of God by the process of their own reason. It is certain, as a fact, that they receive this knowledge, from their earliest consciousness, by the instructions of others and by the doctrine of faith. The decree affirms two things—the one that the works of creation afford a sufficient evidence of the existence of God; the other that the reason has an intrinsic power of discernment by which that evidence may be collected into a logical proof. In this assertion two errors are excluded the one which denies that the visible world presents an adequate evidence of the existence of God; the other that denies to the reason a power to read that evidence without the tradition and proposition of the truth. The second chapter, after vindicating these truths of the natural order, goes on to affirm the possibility and the fact of revelation; it affirms also that revelation is necessary to two things—first, that man may attain to the knowledge of truths above and beyond the order of nature, and, secondly, that by such revelation man may be raised to a higher order of knowledge and perfection.
