QUOTATION: Deism

The Deist attempt to found a natural religion broke down because it was the result of a superficial synthesis, which only succeeded in uniting the etiolated ghost of historic Christianity with the phantasm of pseudo-scientific rationalism. It claimed to be the Religion of Nature, when it was as abstract and artificial as any metaphysical system. It professed to base itself on purely rational grounds, when it really drew it spiritual vitality from the religious tradition that it rejected. It was neither truly religious nor completely rational, and consequently it was rejected alike by the most living religion and by the most serious scientific thought of the new age.

--Christopher Dawson, Progress and Religion

QUOTATION: Private Judgement

Our private judgment is made everything to us,—is contemplated, recognized, and consulted as the arbiter of all questions, and as independent of everything external to us. Nothing is considered to have an existence except so far forth as our minds discern it. The notion of half views and partial knowledge, of guesses, surmises, hopes and fears, of truths faintly apprehended and not understood, of isolated facts in the great scheme of Providence, in a word, the idea of Mystery, is discarded.

--Cardinal John Henry Newman

QUOTATION: Rationalism

Rationalism is a certain abuse of Reason; that is, a use of it for purposes for which it never was intended, and is unfitted. To rationalize in matters of Revelation is to make our reason the standard and measure of the doctrines revealed; to stipulate that those doctrines should be such as to carry with them their own justification; to reject them, if they come in collision with our existing opinions or habits of thought, or are with difficulty harmonized with our existing stock of knowledge. And thus a rationalistic spirit is the antagonist of Faith; for Faith is, in its very nature, the acceptance of what our reason cannot reach, simply and absolutely upon testimony.


--Cardinal John Henry Newman