is most valuable, and its acquisition most laudable; but all above a fortune is a misfortune.  It is a misfortune to him who amasses it; for it is a voluntary continuance in the harness of a beast of burden, when the soul should enfranchise and lift itself up into a higher region of pursuits and pleasures.  It is a persistence in the work of providing goods for the body after the body has already been provided for; and it is a denial of the higher demands of the soul, after the time has arrived, and the means are possessed, of fulfilling those demands....  Because the lower service was once necessary, and has, therefore, been performed, it is a mighty wrong, when, without being longer necessary, it usurps the sacred rights of the higher.

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=_Orestes A. Brownson, 1800-._= (Manual, p. 480.)

From “New Views.”

=_159._= THE DUTY OF PROGRESS.

Progress is the end for which man was made.  To this end it is his duty to direct all his enquiries, all his systems of religion and philosophy, all his institutions of politics and society, all the productions of his genius and taste, in one word, all the modes of his activity.  This is his duty.  Hitherto, he has performed it but blindly, without knowing, and without admitting it.  Humanity has but to-day, as it were, risen to self-consciousness, to a perception of its own capacity, to a glimpse of its inconceivably grand and holy destiny.  Heretofore it has failed to recognize clearly its duty.  It has advanced, but not designedly, not with foresight; it has done it instinctively, by the aid of the invisible but safe-guiding hand of its Father.  Without knowing what it did, it has condemned progress while it was progressing.  It has stoned the prophets and reformers, even while it was itself reforming and uttering glorious prophecies of its future condition.  But the time has now come for humanity to understand itself, to accept the law imposed upon it for its own good, to foresee its end, and march with intention steadily towards it.  Its future religion is the religion of progress.  The true priests are those who can quicken in mankind a desire for progress, and urge them forward in the direction of the true, the good, the perfect.

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From “The Convert.”

=_160._= POLITICS OF CATHOLIC EUROPE IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY DESPOTIC.

In France, Spain, Portugal, and a large part of Italy, all through the seventeenth century, the youth were trained in the maxim, The prince is the State, and his pleasure is law.  Bossuet, in his politics, did only faithfully express the political sentiments and convictions of his age, shared by the great body of Catholics as well as of non-Catholics.  Rational liberty had few defenders, and they were exiled, like Fenelon, from the court.  The politics of Philip II. of Spain, of Richelieu, Mazarin, and Louis XIV. in France, which were the politics of Catholic Europe,