Christianity is revealed to everyone

Conferences of the Rev. Père Lacordaire, p. 155-157*

Christianity is not, perhaps, that which you surmise it to be; it is not a special law given to certain men in a corner of the world, and then spread everywhere by the preaching of the Church. Independently of the fact that the divine testimony is as old as human nature, it must be confessed that Christianity is revealed to every one who comes into this life. It is of Christianity that St. John has said: “That was the true light which enlighteneth every man that cometh into this world; he was in the world and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not; he came unto his own, and his own received him not.”(1) When Christianity knocks at the door of your soul, ah! do not think that it is a stranger who asks you for hospitality. No, it returns to a family which is its own, to a house which it has built; it knows the recess in your heart where it left its traces. … Internal Christianity betrays itself in your acts in spite of yourselves. Every time that you perform a good action— and who can despair of himself so much as to think he will never perform even one?— every time that you perform a good action you affirm the dogmas of Christianity, you are its involuntary apostles. Every time that you give a cup of water to a poor man, even were you the most avowed atheist, you affirm that God exists— God the creator of the world and father in the highest heaven, you affirm the guilt of man and his restoration; you affirm that God is not unmindful of good, that he will judge, and that on the day of his justice that cup of water will be reckoned.

Mad-men, or rather unfortunate men, you attack Christianity, and you do not see the perpetual contradiction which you are to yourselves! Each of your good works confesses the existence of good and evil, and you cannot confess the existence of good and evil without confessing the Christian truths, since all other truths flow from them. No, Christianity is not a doctrine which falls among nations no one knowing how, like those aerolites [meteorites] around which the learned assemble and compose systems. No, this aerolite of Christianity has not fallen unexpectedly from heaven, it was in our conscience. As the magnetic needle turns always towards the pole, however distant it may be, so there is in our heart a magnet which causes it to turn towards the true north, towards God the father, the restorer, the sanctifier.

(1) St. John ch. 1, v. 9 and following.