[See page image]
Page 326
Secret Discipline Secularization THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG 328 and with the intention of receiving absolution. Thus if a penitent were to simulate confession by way of a joke, the confessor would incur only the natural obligation governing such matters, and likewise if the narration of one's sins were made merely in order to obtain counsel or consolation, the secret, though still of the professional kind, would not, however, entail the strict obligation of the sacra mental seal. There are on record a few historic in stances in which the secrecy of the confessional has been heroically defended. The most notable per haps is that of St. John of Nepomuk (q.v)., who is honored as a martyr of the confessional. In 1377 he was chosen by the pious Johanna, wife of the Emperor Wenceslaus, to be her spiritual guide. The emperor, whose life was that of a dissolute tyrant, being jealous of his consort, endeavored first by cajolery and later by threats to obtain from the con fessor a revelation of her confessions. John re mained firm, and after much inhuman treatment he was ordered by the enraged Wenceslaus to be cast into the River Moldau. The order was carried out after nightfall on the vigil of the Ascension, May 16, 1383. JAMES F. DRISCOLL.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: J. P. Gury, Compendium Theologice Horalis, Paris, 1881; and in general writers on moral theology; F. Mame, Vie de Saint Jean NEpoinucane, Paris, 1741; A. Butler, Lives of the Saints, iv. 332.
SECRET, DISCIPLINE OF THE. See ARCANI DISCIPmNA.
SECRETAft, sec"r6-tdn', CHARLES: Swiss Protestant; b. at Lausanne Jan. 18, 1815; d. there Jan. 21, 1895. Educated at Lausanne and Munich, he became, in 1838, associate professor of philosophy at the Academy (after 1891 the University) of Lausanne, where he was promoted to a full professorship three years later. In 1845 he was one of the professors suspended by the radicals during the Vaud revolution, and accordingly delivered his lectures privately until, in 1850, he was called to the Academy of Neuchatel. In 1866, however, he was recalled to Lausanne, where he spent the remainder of his life. His view of the universe, as revealed in his writings, was threefold; philosophically he passed from the position of Schelling and Baader to that of Kant; theologically he abandoned all positive speculation for a dogmatic of ethical consciousness based on Kantian philosophy; sociologically his position was original, though destined to exercise little influence.
Seer6tan's Philosophic de la libert6 (2 vols., Paris, 1849) postulates the identity of the principle of being with the Deity, which is free in self-limitation, and endowed with spirit and will. Man, free to make his own choice, preferred voluntary independence, which he used in favor of evil, this selection being explained by the theory of a preexistent fall. Instead of permitting evil to work itself out, however, the C-eator planned a return to redemption; the primeval purpose of creation, by begetting a perfect type of humanity (the Son of God), whose sufferings, representing man's pain in consequence of sin, cause a reaction realized in Christian history, the end of which is the everlasting life of emancipated humanity. In the two subsequent editions of this work (1866, 1879) Secr4itan sought to adapt his old text
to his changing views, but the attempt was impossible and his ethical and religious concepts received their new form in his Recherches de la m4thode qui conduit d la v&W sur nos plus grands int6rft (NeuchAtel, 1857), La Raison et le christianisme (Paris, 1563), Diseours laiques (1877), Religion et th<sologie (1883), La Civilisation. et la croyance (Lausanne, 1887), and the posthumous Essais de philosophie et de litt6rature (1896). But despite all his shifting of position, he steadily maintained the two principles of freedom and duty, though he surrendered all derivation of the cosmos from a single principle. To him religion was neither the uncritical acceptance of a sum of data, nor the observance of certain rites, nor poetic feeling, but obedience to the moral law in man's own heart, conceived as the operation of a personal force outside him. His attitude toward dogma, therefore, may be described as increasingly indifferent, especially in relation to man's moral position; and he utterly rejected the doctrines of plenary inspiration, the equal importance of all the books of the Bible, and the vicarious sacrifice in the death of Christ, giving this, like the resurrection and the ascension, a distinctly symbolic meaning. He likewise rejected the tenets of eternal punishment and the moral requirement of belief in miracles, and, in his humility, sometimes doubted personal immortality. Personally he preferred the free churches to those supported by the State, though he held that the Church failed to meet the demands of modern times, and advocated greater familiarity with modern culture on the part of ministers, with an intensification of practical work and less stress on purely theological problems.
Shortly after the publication of his second great work, the Principe de la morale (Lausanne, 1883), Secr6tan turned his attention especially to sociology, his Civilisation et la croyance, already noted, treating its theme from the threefold point of view of philosophy, theology, and sociology, while the economic and political sides receive almost exclusive attention in his Le Droit de la femme (Paris, 1887), 9tudes sociales (1899), Les Droits de l'humaniM (1890), and Mon Utopie (1882). He sought, on the one hand, to secure for the masses that prosperity which the economic development of centuries had taken from them by unequal division of property and class favoritism; and on the other hand, here parting company with socialism, he emphasized the natural and inherent inequality of individuals, and their consequent rights to different degrees of wealth and wages. He strongly advocated cooperative labor, savings-banks, insurance against old age, accident, and loss of employment, as well as the emancipation of woman, for all which he strove with the technical knowledge of a political economist and the motives of an ethicist and friend of the people. (E. C. PLATZHOFF-LEJEUNE.)
BIHLIOGR.AFIrY: (3. Frommel, in Esquisses contemporaines, Lausanne, 1891; F. Pillon, La Philosophie de Charles Secriltan, Paris, 1897; J. Duproix, Ch. Secr&an et la phi losophic kantienne, ib. 1900.
SECULARISM: An atheistic and materialistic movement established in England about the middle of the nineteenth century, at one time counting hundreds of thousands of adherents. The founder