There can be no rational belief in God, in the immortality of the soul, in human responsibility as against Christianity, as there can be no rational belief in Christianity as against Catholicity. Outside of the Catholic Church there is only nihilism.
It would be difficult to predict the precise course of these “come-outers” of the latest date, called free-religionists. Some will probably stop after having repudiated Protestantism, rest upon the truths of reason, and, without inquiring further, vainly try to satisfy, with a species of theism, the great aspirations and deep needs of their souls; eventually they may fall back on old Unitarianism. Others will venture to examine, as some before them have done, the claims of the Catholic Church, and finding that these are founded on human reason, that her doctrines perfect the truths of human reason, and that she alone is adequate to satisfy all the wants of the human heart, will become in the course of time Catholics, and save their souls—that is, reach their high destiny. Another section will, during, perhaps, their whole lives, seriously amuse themselves with the study of Brahminism, Buddhism, and every other kind of outlandish religion—not a vain intellectual amusement, except when associated with the absurd idea of concocting a new religion. While the larger section, we fear, will follow the tangent and end in nihilism. For although the main drift of the religious world outside of the Catholic Church, especially in the United States, is towards naturalism; although the face of each free-religionist looks in a somewhat different way, yet the actual movement of the greatest number of these Unitarian dissenters is apparently in the direction of zero.
Precisely where the president of the Free-Religious Association stands, to what definite truths he assents as undeniable, and what convictions he holds as settled, is not to be gathered from any of his sermons, tracts, speeches, and several published books. He seems to be laboring under the impression that he has a mission to bring forth a new religion, but thus far he or his associates in this illusive idea have given to the world no new word in religion, or in morals, or in philosophy, or in politics, or in social life, or in art, or in science, or in method, or in anything else _scibile_. Mr. William R. Alger has ventured to predict to his free-religionist brethren in their last annual gathering a new incarnation and its gospel, in which we fail to see anything new or important, if true. “The spirit of science,” such are the words of his prophecy, “enriched with the spirit of piety, is the avatar of the new Messiah.”