' After which speech he found it desirable to spend six months in
retirement at the home of a woodcutter. With all this, he was so
superstitious that prodigies and omens gave him incessant frights,
leaving him no belief to spare for the immortality of the soul. When
his hearers questioned him on the matter, he answered that no one knew
what became of a man, of his soul or his spirit, after death, and the
talk about another life was only fit to frighten old women. But when he
came to die, he commended in his will his soul or his spirit to
Almighty God, exhorted his weeping pupils to fear the Lord, and
especially to believe in immortality and future retribution, and
received the Sacrament with much fervor. We have no guarantee that more
famous men in the same calling, however significant their opinions may
be, were in practical life any more consistent. It is probable that
most of them wavered inwardly between incredulity and a remnant of the
faith in which they were brought up, and outwardly held for prudential
reasons to the Church.
Through the connexion of rationalism with the newly born science of
historical investigation, some timid attempts at biblical criticism may
here and there have been made. A saying of Pius II has been recorded,
which seems intended to prepare the way for such criticism: 'Even if
Christianity were not confirmed by miracles, it ought still to be
accepted on account of its morality.
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