We need but look at the present state of men's minds to see how the world gets on without the church. Never were men more active or indefatigable in their researches: they send their piercing glances into all subjects, sacred and profane; they investigate the heavens and the earth, the present and the past, and leave no nook or corner of nature unexplored, and yet there is not a principle of ethics, politics, or science that is not denied or called in question. In the moral and political world nothing is fixed or settled, and moral and intellectual science, as well as statesmanship, disappears. Doubt and uncertainty hang over all questions, and the distinctions between right and wrong, just and unjust, as well as between good and evil, are obscured and well-nigh obliterated. The utmost confusion reigns in the whole world of thought, and "men," as a distinguished prelate said to us the other day, "are trying the experiment of governing the world without conscience." All this proves what we maintain, that they who deny the church, or reject her teaching, have no truth to oppose to her, no reason for their denial, and no principle on which they base their rejection of her authority. Their rejection of the church and her teaching is purely gratuitous, and therefore, if not sinful, is at least baseless.
This much is certain, that it is either the church or nothing. There is no other alternative. Nothing is more absurd than for those who reject the church and her teaching to pretend to be Christian teachers or believers. They cannot believe the revelation God has made on the veracity of God alone, for they have no witness, not even an unassisted human witness, of the fact of revelation, of what God has revealed, or that he has or has not revealed anything, since they have no witness who was the contemporary of our Lord and his apostles--they were none of them born then--and they have no institution that dates from apostolic times, and that has continued without break down to the present. In fact, what they profess to believe, in so far as they believe it at all, they believe on the authority of the church, or of that very tradition which they reject and deny to be authority. They agree among themselves in their doctrinal belief only when and where they agree with the church; whenever and wherever they break from Catholic tradition, preserved and handed down by her, they disagree and fight with one another, are all at sea, and have neither chart nor compass. Do they tell us that they agree in the essentials of the Christian faith? Yet it is only so far as they follow Catholic tradition that they know or can agree among themselves as to what are or are not essentials. There is a wide difference between what Dr. Pusey holds to be essential and what is held to be essential by Dr. Bellows. Nearly the only point in which the two agree is in rejecting the infallible authority of the successor of Peter; and, in rejecting that authority, neither has any authority for believing what he believes, or for denying what he denies. Deny the church, and you have no authority for asserting divine revelation at all, as your rationalists and radicals conclusively prove.