The New Zealand Tablet. Fiat Justitia. THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 1900. DR. MIVART'S DRIFT.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVIII, Issue 8, 22 February 1900, Page 17

The New Zealand Tablet. Fiat Justitia. THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 1900. DR. MIV ART'S DRIFT.

F>. MIVART has drifted away from the Catholic Church, His article in the Fortnightly Revieiv for January contains professions of personal belief which cut him adrift from any and every form of even the most comprehensive Christianity. Dr. Mivart became a convert to the Catholic Church in 1844. He attained some note as a biologist, published six works between 1871 and 1885, was a polished and popular magazine writer, a clever theorist on the lines of theistic evolution, but neither a deep thinker nor reasoner, and as an original investigator ranks third-rate or fourth-rate even in his own special branches of research. Dr. Mivart is best known to the random or superficial reader by his frequent contributions on all sorts of subjects to more or less popular magazines. But not one in a thousand of those who have a casual acquaintance with the fugitive piece s which kept him most in the public eye could furnish even the most partial list of the few facts in biology or comparative anatomy to which he first directed attention. To the general treasury of natural knowledge he has made no notable contribution. In his article in the Fortnightly he tells us that he is ' not a theologian. 1 The reminder is quite unnecessary for those who are acquainted with his writings. But, none the less, like TVxdall and Darwin — whose agnostic spirit he happily never shared — he lately made the fatal mistake of applying the experimental method (the only one with which he had ever any close acquaintance) to the discussion of the profoundest questions of philosophy and religion. The indications of his doctrinal eccentricities began some seven years ago with the publication of his extraordinary article on ' Happiness in Hell.' Its condemnation by the Holy See followed swiftly on its first appearance. For some time past the Doctor's doctrinal ground has evidently been rapidly shifting. His letters to the Times over the Dreyfus case and his later magazine articles display a notable falling off from his old mental vigour and charms of style, and are characterised by the thinlydisguised enunciation of heretical ideas and by a singularly violent, vindictive, and hysterical abuse of the Roman Curia. But in the January issue of the Fortnightly, he takes a definite doctrinal stand which raises a cloud-high barrier between him and every Christian Church. Under the ignominious cover of anonymous and non-existent witnesses he denies or doubts such cardinal doctrines as the Fall, original sin, the inspiration of the Scriptures (in the Christian sense), and

the Incarnation and Resurrection of the Saviour of mankind. Dr. Mivart's position, as the London Tablet says, is now plainly that of 'an outsider and opponent of the Catholic faith.' With such beliefs as he holds his only possible place is outside the Church's pale. Says the Tablet : 'Men who have ceased to believe in Catholic dogmas can work nothing but mischief while they stand within. Outside, the best of them are as harmless as the Protestant Alliance or the merest no- Popery lecturer, and the Church of God is all the stronger and better for their prompt/ elimination.' The aged biologist — for he is now Reventy-three years old — tells us, however, that he still prizes ' continued conformity' with the Catholic Church. And many will join with us in praying that the Bestower of all grace may yet again give him the light to see the true way and the grace tc once more humoly wulk therein. « * • Dr. Mivart fell into and made the most of two blunders from which even a slight acquaintance with Catholic theology would have saved him : (1) that the infallibility of the Church is necessarily involved in the decrees of Roman Congregations ; and (2) that the mission of the Church is to teach physical science as well as to save souls. No wellinformed Catholic contends or ever did contend that the decisions of the Roman Congregations are infallible. As to the Church's relations with the physical sciences, they are beat expressed in the words of the Vatican Council : ' The Church, far from being opposed to the progress of human arts and sciences, assists and encourages ti em in every way. . . . She does more, and recognises that, coming from God, the Author of science, their proper use should, with the assistance of His grace, lead to God.' The principles of theology are as true as those of experimental science. And ' revealed truth,' says Cardinal Newman, ' enters to a very great extent into the province of science, philosophy, and literature, and to put it on one side in compliment to secular science is simply under colour of a compliment to do science a great damage.' To draw just conclusions scientists must perforce have recourse to another and higher order of knowledge. Without the light of revealed truth, what they say may be, in Newman's words, ' true, but not the measure of all things ; true, but, if thus inordinately, extravagantly, and ruinously carried out, in spite of other sciences, in spite of theology, sure to become but a great bubble and burst.' Dr. Mivart himself fully recognised the need of this corrective to unbridled and illogical hypotheses in hisJ-Z/^.w •>■ from Net are, which first saw the light in 1876, long before he set forth on his career of amateur dabbling in theological theorising. In that work he has words of fiery condemnation for those who in public lectures and writings maintain the inconsistency of science with religion. 'In such lecture?,' he says, ' attempts have again and again been made to strike theology through physical science, or to blacken religion with coal-dust, or to pelt it with chalk, or to smother it with sub- Atlantic mud, or to drown it with a sea of protoplasm.' In the following year an investigator beside whom Dr. Mivart is the merest pygmy — namely, Dr. Virchow — in his address to the Congress of German naturalists at Munich, denounced those who 'attempt simply to dispossess the Church and supplant its dogmas forthwith by a religion of evolution- Dr. Virchow is no friend of the Catholic Church. But he added : • Be assured, gentlemen, that every such attempt will make shipwreck, and its wreck will also bring with it the greatest perils for the whole position of science.' The great German pathologist stands firmly to this day by the principles which he formulated in 1877. His lesser English confrere has, in the sere and yellow leaf of his life, reversed the sound principles which he so vigorously defended in the full green summer of his intellect and manhood. He has reversed the natural order of things and made religion the handmaid of science and not science the handmaid of religion. He has, so to speak, relegated the lady of the house to the kitchen and sent the maid to preside in the drawingroom. And in his mental household as in that of others whose example he formerly condemned but now follows, the result has been a noisy and not altogether decorous sample of 'high life' upstairs. • • * The true man of science is modest. He has, like Virchow, little patience with those parasites of science who make use of the labours and discoveries of others to spin

fantastic theries and flimsy hypotheses which they endeavour to force upon the world as so much proven and veritable fact. The illustrious Catholic chemist, J. B. Dumas, of the French Academy of Sciences, says in this connection :—: — It is quite different with people who have made discoveries themselves. They know by experience how limited their field is, and they find themselves at every step arrested by the incomprehensible. Hence their religion and modesty. Faith and respect for mysteries are easy for them. The more progress they make \n science, the more they are confounded by the infinite. The history of the advance of all true and genuine science — a& opposed to mere theory-spinning — abundantly proves the truth of M. Dumas' observations. ' All the great scientists of the world,' says Zahm, ' have been, are, and ever must be men of faith, men of religious instincts, men who have felt on them the spell of religious teaching. 1 Very few of the world's great scientists have been men of irreligious mind. Kepler, Sir Isaac Newton, ttr Humphkey Davy, Midler, James Clerk Maxwell, are random names taken from the roll of great and convinced Protestant scientists. The Catholic Church ha 3 furnished by far the grandest bead-roll of illustrious names in the field of scientific research. To her devoted sons — Gerbert (afterwarde Pope Sylvester II.), Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon, the friar — the world owes the inductive or experimental method of study which has contributed so materially to the development of the physical sciences. And the greatest names in this department of human learning have been those of her faithful children : Copernicus, Galileo, Da Vinci, Fourier, Figuier, Buffon, Volta, Ampere, Galvani, Fathers Secchi, Perry, De Vico, and Denza, Descartes, Pascal, Baerande, Chavreul, Hermite, Van Baneden, Pasteur, and hundreds of others that attained to high eminence in the various branches of natural science. The late Mr. Gladstone wrote the following appropriate remarks in point : — Since the first 300 years of persecution the Roman Catholic Church has marched for fifteen hundred years at the head of human civilisation, and has driven, harnessed to its chariot as the horses of a triumphal car, the chief intellectual and material forces of the world ; its art, the art of the world ; its genius, the genius of the world ; its greatness, glory, grandeur, and majesty have been almost, though not absolutely, all that, in these respects, the world has had to boast of. » * * The illustrious Catholic investigators into the natural sciences have ever been aware that there is nothing in the teachings of the Church incompatible with the highest exercise of reason and the deepest inquiry into the realms, of phys cal research. God is the Author of all truth. And no genuine and proven finding of true science can be inconsistent with any doctrine of true faith. The illustrious Dr. Brownson, one of the greatest philosophers of the present century, says in his Concert : — I never in a single instance found a single article, dogma, proposition, or definition of faith which embarrassed me as a logician, or which I would, so far as my own reason was concerned, have changed or modified, or in any respect altered from what I found it, even if I had been free to do so. I have never found my reason struggling agiinst the teachings of the Church, or felt it restrained, or myself reduced to a Ptate of mental slavery. I have as a Catholic felt and enjoyed a mental freedom which I never conceived possible when I was a non-Catholic. Such, too, were the sentiments of Dr. Mivart in the full flush of his mental vigour. Such, by the Divine grace, may they be once more before his passage to the great Beyond !