GENTILISM.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 180, 8 September 1876, Page 7

GENTILISM.

-MWe should welcome with very great pleasure any truly learned work from the pen of a Catholic author on the subject of one of the growing heresies of the day, that, namely, which seeks to throw discredit on the Christian account of the history of our race by the theory of the original barbarism of the first generations of mankind. It is a theory winch has many attractions to the enemies of faith, who are doing all in their power, however unconsciously, to reduce the race once more to a state of savage ignorance and sensuality quite as bad as any that they have imagined as the condition of our first ancestors. The delight with which a writer in a late number of the ' Geographical Magazine ' gloated over the rumored discovery of a race of men somewhere, we think in the East Indian Ai chipelago, who still, as he would say, possessed the aboriginal tails which were once the proud boast of the whole of mankind, is an instance of the joy with which certain would-be philosophers of the day hail everything that tends, even in the most distant manner to support the theory that man is by nature a progressive animal, who has already achieved great conquests in the development of his intelligence and other faculties, and who is yet destined to achieve more such conquests. But in truth, history beai's witness that man's natural tendency is to degradation, unless he be assisted from above. Lefii to himself, man is far more likely in the nine-

teenth century to return, as these theorists would say, to the ape than to rise any higher in the scale of being. The history of mankind, as it can be traced by monuments and documents, is the history of a race which started with a far larger appanage of intellectual cultivation, general knowledge, and moral evelation than it retained. It began in light and sank into darkness, out of which it has only been rescued by the action of Christian grace and the Catholic Church.

We say that any work on this important subject would be certainly welcome from a Catholic point of view. We are more than ordinarily glad to find before us such a work, partial though it be, from the hand of the very learned and able writer to whom we already owe a valuable volume on the " Irish Race." Father Thebaud is already well known on both sides of the Atlantic, and we trust to rpceive still further contributions from his pen to the cause of Catholic truth. The bearing of his present work may be described in a few words which we shall extract from the author's preface :

" We assert that if things had taken place as the evolutionists assure us they have, the first records of mankind would be those of rude people just emerging from barbarism. In point of art and culture, in point of ideas and language, chiefly in point of religion, wo should find in their remains still the most rude elements of a ' childish ' and growing soul ; we should be able to trace the steps by which, from the first notions of a coarse religious system, they would have arrived at the point of inventing God and all his attributes. This would have been, in the sense of evolutionists, a mere subjective theory, perfectly independent of any objective divine essence, and having nothing in common with the certain belief that the reason of man can know God and demonstrate to himself his existence. They assert it has been so, and that historical man began everywhere by being a barbarian. Here we join issue with them, and one of the great purports of this volume will bo to establish solidly the fact, that man appeared first in a state of civilization, possessed of noble ideas as to himself, his origin, the Creator, one Supreme God, ruling the universe, etc. We intend to prove historically that he invented none of the great religious and moral truths by the process mentioned above, but that these cHine to him from heaven. We will endeavor to show the first men everywhere monotheists, generally pure in their morals, dignified in their bearing, and cultivated in their intellect." — ' London Month.'