Humanity Its Destiny and the Means to Obtain It

THE destructive work of the French Revolution of 1789 is still going on. There exists in the world to-day a strong organization that considers the work of the Revolution incomplete as long as there are people in the world who believe in the supernatural and the eternal destiny of man, and as long as the Church of God, founded for the purpose of leading humanity to its last end, is not annihilated. This organization hates God and His comlnandments, and it is the sworn and everlasting enemy of the Church of God, which represents the demands of God upon the world as unchangeable and absolute. The inculcation of God's holy law is her divine mission – the diffusion of virtue, which is vastly more needed in the world than worldly knowledge, which certain ones constantly proclaim as the panacea of all evil. The formation of 1nen of character is more important than men of so-called intellectual culture, whose hearts are estranged from God through ignorance of His holy laws and of man's relation to Him.The Catholic Church is the foremost religious body in the world-and always has been-devoted to the enlargement of knowledge, but she insists, at the same ti1ne, upon the greater necessity of the practice of those virtues which are in keeping with 1nan's true dignity - the vocation to a spiritual life and the fulfil1nent of his threefold duty - his duty to God, his duty to his neighbor and to society, and his duty to himself. The true dignity of man and the 1neans to attain and to sustain it is scarcely anywhere else more succinctly and profoundly considered and defended with more cogent philosophical and theological reasons than in the following discourses of the great son of St. Dominic - Father Denifle, - which he delivered in the Cathedral of Gratz, in Austria, at a time when he was still a young but a most brilliant lector of the Dominican house of studies in that city, in the year 1872, and which he carefully revised in later years. The thoughts and ideas of great minds should be preserved and disse1ninated by all means available, and, therefore, with many others, I deem it not only proper but a real benefit to our English-speaking Catholics and all truth-loving non-Catholics to clothe these terse and profoundly philosophical and theological thoughts of the great scholar and noble Dominican Father Denifle-upon the most important subject that can possibly interest man and humanity - in an English dress. All who are anxious to know the relation between God and man, between the Church and the State, the subordination of the one to theother, and the c0111,plete har'mony that should existbetween both, will find a full explanation in thesepages, given by one who fearlessly and without reserve approaches the question and gives the proper and only true solution as it exists in the design of Him who is the author of both.Out of profound respect for the author I have adhered closely to his 1node of expression, in order to give as correctly as possible his own weighty ideas, especially so since it is well known that many of the thoughts contained herein were afterwards utilized and dilated upon by the late and learned Pope Leo XIII, in some of his 1nagnificent Encyclicals. The stupendous knowledge, the historical, philosophical and theological rectitude of the author of these discourses, merited for him, and obtained a much deserved acknowledgment from the greatest universities and learned societies of the scholarly world.While on his way to England to receive the honorary doctorate front the university of Cambridge, he died suddenly on June 10, 1905, at Munich, in his sixty first year. His premature death was an irreparable loss, not only to the great Dominican order, whose most loyal son he ever was, and to the Catholic Church in general, but to the world at large, to every sincere and learned searcher after truth.