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The casuistical subtilties may not be greater than the snbtilties of lawyers, hinted at above; but as the former are PERNICIOUS, and the latter INNOCENT and even NECESSARY, this is the reason of the very different reception they meet with from the world. It is a doctrine of the Church of Rome, that the priest, by a secret direction of his intention, can invalidate any sacrament.
I find contradiction where I had looked for harmony; ambiguity where I had expected clearness; zeal taking the place of reason; anger, intolerance, personal feuds and sectarian bitterness, interminable discussions and weary controversies; while infinite Truth, for which I have been seeking, lies still beyond, or seen, if at all, only by transient and unsatisfying glimpses, obscured and darkened by miserable subtilties and cabalistic mysteries."
These are the chief performances which engage the attention of posterity. Those numberless productions with which the press then abounded; the cant of the pulpit, the declamations of party, the subtilties of theology, all these have long ago sunk in silence and oblivion.
"And nothing that I don't like? please say that; because I think I dislike what I don't like more than I like what I like," said Gwendolen, finding herself in the woman's paradise, where all her nonsense is adorable. Grandcourt paused; these were subtilties in which he had much experience of his own. "I don't know this is such a brute of a world, things are always turning up that one doesn't like.
"Well, if you will pardon a little more plain speaking, I will say that this is something I know a good deal more about than you do." "We have made other arrangements for the laboratory," and the professor picked up a paper from his desk and looked it over, nice subtilties evidently being lost. "So?
The labors of the synod instead of purifying the Romish Church from its corruptions had only reduced the latter to greater definiteness and precision, and invested them with the sanction of authority. All the subtilties of its teaching, all the arts and usurpations of the Roman See, which had hitherto rested more on arbitrary usage, were now passed into laws and raised into a system.
As to public education, there was no extensive range and nothing really useful to the community in the instruction received by children at college; no justice and no humanity in the treatment they experienced; a fruitless and ridiculously prolonged study of words succeeded by a no less fruitless study of interminable subtilties, and all this fruitless knowledge driven into the brains of children by help of chastisements, blows, and that barbarous severity which seems to regard the Compelle intrare as the principal law and object of instruction.
It must appear desirable in order to be desired; it must be desired in order to appear desirable: the perception must precede the desire, and the desire must precede the perception. These are foolish subtilties, but all the fitter for their purpose.
A student in theology could even in our times sit at the feet of Thomas Aquinas, as he could at the feet of Augustine or Calvin; except that in the theology which Thomas Aquinas commented upon there is a cumbrous method, borrowed from Aristotle, which introduced infinite distinctions and questions and definitions and deductions and ramifications which have no charm to men who have other things to occupy their minds than Scholastic subtilties, acute and logical as they may be.
Fond as he was of doctrinal subtilties, keen as was his analysis of disinterested benevolence, he did not, like some in our day, confine himself to analyzing virtue in the abstract, but took upon himself the duty of practicing it in the concrete without fear of consequences, well knowing that there is no logic like that of consistent action.
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