The Catholic Church will never abandon a jot or
tittle of her scholastic and orthodox system; she can no more do so
than the Comte de Chambord can cease to be legitimist. I have no doubt
that there will be schisms, more, perhaps, than ever before, but
the true Catholic will be inflexible in the declaration: "If I
must abandon my past, I shall abandon the whole; for I believe in
everything upon the principle of infallibility, and this principle
is as much affected by one small concession as by ten thousand large
ones." For the Catholic Church to admit that Daniel was an apocryphal
person of the time of the Maccabaei, would be to admit that she
had made a mistake; if she was mistaken in that, she may have been
mistaken in others, and she is no longer divinely inspired.
I do not, therefore, in any way regret having been brought into
contact, for my religious education, with sincere teachers, who would
have scrupulously avoided letting me labour under any illusion as to
what a Catholic is required to admit. The Catholicism which was taught
me is not the insipid compromise, suitable only for laymen, which has
led to so many misunderstandings in the present day. My Catholicism
was that of Scripture, of the councils, and of the theologians.
This Catholicism I loved, and I still respect it; having found it
inadmissible, I separated myself from it. This is a straightforward
course, but what is not straightforward is to pretend ignorance of
the engagement contracted, and to become the apologist of things
concerning which one is ignorant.
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