And so, today, if the state can no longer appeal to the old moral principles that belong to the Christian tradition, it will be forced to create a new official faith and new moral principles which will be binding on its citizens.

It is impossible for us to understand the Church if we regard her as subject to the limitations of human culture. For she is essentially a supernatural organism which transcends human cultures and transforms them to her own ends.

The sublimated idealism of the Enlightenment, the spirit of the League of Nations and of the United Nations Charter have not proved strong enough to control the aggressive dynamism of nationalism.

It is clear that this essential Christian doctrine gives a new value to human nature, to human history and to human life which is not to be found in the other great oriental religions.

The present age has seen a great slump in humanist values.

Faith transcends reason because divine truth is not only higher, but also wider than the human mind, and the rationalist in his haste for premature simplification always tends to shut his eyes to one aspect of the truth and to seek a false harmony of thought by the sacrifice of an essential element of reality.

The true makes of history are the spiritual men whom the world knew not, the unregarded agents of the creative action of the Spirit. The supreme instance of this-the key to the Christian understanding of history-is to be found in the Incarnation- the presence of the maker of the world in the world unknown to the world. ... The Incarnation is itself in a sense the divine fruit of history-of the fullness of time-and it finds its extension and completion in the historic life of the Church.