Thus we live in a period of which a characteristic is the supplanting of human and animal labor by machines.
Its mechanical inventions have wrought a social revolution.

We appeal to the natural, not to the supernatural, for the accomplishment of our ends.

It is with the "modern civilization" thus arising that Catholicism refuses to be reconciled.

The papacy loudly proclaims its inflexible repudiation of this state of affairs, and insists on a restoration of the medieval condition of things.
That a piece of amber, when rubbed, will attract and then repel light bodies, was a fact known six hundred years before Christ.

It remained an isolated, uncultivated fact, a mere trifle, until sixteen hundred years after Christ.