“We live in a society that can’t see the woods for the trees, but that has corps of “experts” out in the forest studying the bark, watching the moss grow, and counting the leaves. Suppose you were to go to one of these experts, or even to the president of one of the colleges at which he was trained, and ask a simple question such as:

“Tell me, on what principle do you decide which trees to cut down and which to allow to grow?” or “What are woods for, and who made them?” or “What is the significance of the fact (as you have determined after a life study) that oak trees thirty years old average 46,501 leaves a season as compared with 65,834 in elm trees?

Suppose you were to ask these questions, and suppose you got in return nothing but puzzled looks. Would you not suppose you were in a nation of slightly crazed men?

What we need is not more detail, but some perspective; not yet more facts (as often as not erroneous ones), but some principles; we need some last ends, some first directives, some clear light, some meaning.

We are thirsting, in a word, for theology. Theology is the science which will give us the last ends, the first principles, the meanings, the clarity and the directions which alone will make sense of the world and ourselves.

But theology is the one science which is generally withheld from us. This is due to the taint of liberalism, which has even affected Catholics. The liberal view is that it is not cricket to be told the answers and to go on from there, and that it is positively unmanly to have any certainty. It is all right to look for the final answers, only you must do so blindfolded, and never, never find them.

So the liberal world goes groping about, while we Catholics often neglect to use the fullness of our revealed truth out of mistaken deference to those who cannot accept revelation because they cannot figure it out themselves.

Instead of theology we have been feeding on the insufficient food of philosophy, apologetics and devotionalism. — Carol Robinson, Collected Works, June 1947