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.

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 present age has seen a great slump in humanist values.

The modern dilemma is essentially a spiritual one, and every one of its main aspects, moral, political and scientific, brings us back to the need of a religious solution.

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.

For humanism also appeals to man as man. It seeks to liberate the universal qualities of human nature from the narrow limitations of blood and soil and class and to create a common language and a common culture in which men can realize their common humanity.

Humanism and Divinity are as complementary to one another in theorder of culture, as are Nature and Grace in the order of being.