Page 12 - FLIPBOOK - Life of Saint Gerard Majella - Vassall-Phillips

O. R. VASSALL-PHILLIPS

on the value of the evidence which may be adducible in their support.
If the evidence seems worthless, we are quite free to deny the facts.
No Catholic may say that miracles have ceased. That would be to
contradict the Promises of Christ, and to go against the clear Mind of
the Church. But with regard to any particular marvels, we are
encouraged by the proverbial caution of Ecclesiastical Authority to
shrink from arriving at hasty conclusions, and are always permitted to
use our own judgment, provided that we do so in the spirit of due
humility and reverence, not in that of a proud and shallow self-
sufficiency which would ignorantly reject everything that lies outside
the narrow bounds of its own limited experience.
With reference to the testimony on which we receive the
supernatural Life of Saint Gerard, those who may desire to test its
worth may be referred with confidence to the Processes of his
Beatification. The author desires to state that he is himself satisfied as
to the truth of all that he has related; moreover, he fails to see how
anyone can arrive at a different conclusion after a careful study of the
evidence, unless, indeed, he has unhappily raised a cloud of prejudice
in his own mind by denying on a priori grounds the possibility of the
miraculous in the abstract, notwithstanding all testimony — however
overwhelming — whether human or Divine, that may be brought
forward to the opposite in the concrete.
Such a man, little as he may be prepared to admit it, has in truth
effectually closed the gates to any reasonable discussion; he has
travelled beyond the domain where argument may hope to reach him;
bowing down complacently before a wooden fetish of his own
creation — a true bigot — he takes refuge behind the bulwark of
generalizations that must be upheld at all costs; in the superstitious
homage that he pays to the Law of Uniformity in Nature, he denies
the power — sometimes even the existence — of the Supreme
Lawgiver, Who most certainly can, for His own wise purposes,
derogate from the order which He has Himself established.
Faith and Reason ever go hand in hand. The Catholic System
harmonizes with all ascertained facts. The various forms of
Rationalism, on the contrary — often mutually destructive though
they are — always agree in this, that they depend for their existence
on purely destructive criticism, and on theories stated with much
pretence and show of learning, but which admit of no verification
whatsoever. If they who prefer Faith, Reason, and Fact to impossible

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