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The Catholic Democracy of America, 75
" The watchwords of the age are reason, education, liberty, the material
improvement of the masses. Nor are these watchwords empty sounds-
They represent solid realities, for which the age deserves praise. . . .
Despite its defects and mistakes I love my age. I love-its aspirations and
its resolves. I revel in its feats of valor, its industries and its discoveries.
I thank it for its many benefactions to my fellowmen, to the people rather
than princes and rulers. I seek no backward voyage across the sea of time-
I will even press forward. ... In our American parlance, let us go ahead.
What if we do at times blunder ? If we never venture we shall never gain.
The conservatism which is resolved to be ever safe is dry-rot.
" Do not fear the novel, provided principles are well guarded. It ia a
time of novelties—and religious action, to accord with the age, must take
new forms and new directions. Let there be individual action. Laymen
need not wait for priest, nor priest for bishop, nor bishop for Pope. The
timid move in crowds, the brave in single file. When combined efforts are
called for, be ready, and at all times be prompt to obey when orders are
given; but with all this there is vast room for individual action, and vast
good to be done by it.
" We should live in our age, know it, be in touch with it. There are
Catholics more numerous, however, in Europe than in America, to whom
the present will not be known until long after it shall have become the
past. Our work is in the present, and not in the past. It will not do to
understand the thirteenth better than the nineteenth century; to be more
conversant with the errors of Arius or Eutyches than with those of contemporary
infidels or agnostics; to study more deeply the causes of Albigensian
or Lutheran heresies, or the French Revolution, than the causes of
the social upheavals of our own times. The world has entered into an
entirely new phase; the past will not return; reaction is the dream of men
who see not, and hear not; who sit at the gates of cemeteries weeping over
tombs that shall not be reopened, in utter oblivion of the living world back
of them. We should speak to our age of things it feels and in language it
understands. We should be in it, and of it, if we would have its ear.
" For the same reason there is needed a thorough sympathy with the
country. The Church of America must be, of course, as Catholic as ever in
Jerusalem or Rome; but so far as her garments assume color from the local
atmosphere she must be American. Let no one dare paint her brow with
foreign tint, or pin to her mantle foreign linings. There is danger; we
receive large accessions of Catholics from foreign countries. God witnesses
it they are welcome. I will not intrude on their personal affections and
tastes; but those, if foreign, they shall not incrust upon the Church.
Americans have no longing for a Church with foreign aspect; it would
wield no influence over them. In no manner could it prosper; exotics have
never but sickly forms.
"The strength of the Church to-day in all countries particularly in
America, is the people. This is essentially the age of democracy. The days