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In Egypt such a man is nowadays already considered as one of those more conservative moderns, who prefer the rationalistic explanation of the Azhar lore to putting it aside altogether.
Rationalistic history and criticism are therefore based, as Pius X. most accurately observed in his Encyclical on modernism, on rationalistic philosophy; and we might add that rationalistic philosophy is based on practical art, and that practical art, by which we help ourselves, like Prometheus, and make instruments of what religion worships, when this art is carried beyond the narrowest bounds, is the essence of pride and irreligion.
But the whole drift of the old Brahmanical doctrines had been toward sacrifice as a debt and credit system, and that plan had failed. It had impoverished the land and ruined the people, and had brought no spiritual comfort. Men had found that they could not buy salvation. Moreover, Buddhism and other forms of rationalistic philosophy, after prolonged and thorough experiment, had also failed.
Thus, for a few months, Rousseaus idea was more or less realized. It meant intolerance. Atheism was regarded as a vice, and all were atheists who did not think like Robespierre. The plan was to favour the growth of new rationalistic cults, and to undermine revealed religion by a secular system of education.
Formally, this scheme of an organism of truth that has already fed as it were on its own liability to death, so that, death once dead for it, there's no more dying then, is the very fulfilment of the rationalistic aspiration.
In truth, Diderot's mind was at this time floating in an atmosphere of rationalistic negation, and the moral of his piece, as he hints, points first to the extravagance of Catholicism, next to the vanity of the pleasures of the world, and lastly, to the unfathomable uncertainty of philosophy.
To exorcise them, the old Church of Christendom has her mystic formulae, of which no rationalistic prescription can take the place. If Cowper had been a good Roman Catholic, instead of having his conscience handled by a Protestant like John Newton, he would not have died despairing, looking upon himself as a castaway.
Judge Davis, who knew him well, affirms that he had no faith, in the Christian sense, but only in laws, principles, cause and effect, that is, he had no belief in a personal God. No religion seemed to find favor with him except that of a practical and rationalistic order.
Upon his remonstrance, she replied that he had said that these parts were not reliable, and so she did not want them as a part of her Bible. He was shocked at his own vandalism. I have shown that the same rationalistic objections that are brought against facts revealed in the Bible can be brought against facts revealed in nature.
And thus, for a long time, Christianity had been wrongly conceived as history, beginning with what to Paul and the Jews was an historical event, the allegory of the Garden of Eden, the fall of Adam, and ending with the Jewish conception of the Atonement. This was a rationalistic and not a spiritual religion.
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