The Revolt of Society From God
Nov 24, 2019 12:59:20 GMT
Post by Admin on Nov 24, 2019 12:59:20 GMT
The Revolt of Society From God
by Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, 1872
"The nation and the kingdom that will not serve Thee shall perish"--Isaias lx. 12.
These words are the promise of God to His Incarnate Son, the King of kings, and Lord of all the earth, which He has redeemed with His precious blood. It was to Him also that the words were spoken: "Sit Thou at My right hand, until I make Thy enemies Thy footstool (Ps. cix. 1, 2)." The Son of God declares of Himself: "I am appointed King by Him over Sion His holy mountain (Ibid. ii. 6)." Before He ascended into heaven, our Lord said to His disciples, "All power in heaven and on earth is given unto Me;" and He promised them, saying, "I dispose"--that, I give--"unto you a kingdom, as My Father has disposed unto Me. (St . Matt, xxviii. 18; St. Luke xxii. 29.)" This kingdom, then, is the kingdom of Jesus Christ; and the prophecy here is, that any nation or any kingdom that will not serve Him shall perish. Any nation or kingdom that says, "We will not have this Man to reign over us," refuses the sovereignty of Jesus Christ, and thereby shall fall.
It was on the day of Pentecost that the proclamation of the coming of this kingdom was first made in a multitude of tongues, and from Jerusalem was spread throughout the world. God the Holy Ghost on that day came as the "sound of a mighty wind," and by tongues of fire, speaking to the eye and to the ear, in witness of His Royal presence, Majesty, and power.
I have already spoken of the revolt of the intellect from truth, and also of the revolt of the will from God. Our present subject is the revolt of man from the authority of God. When I say the revolt of man, I do not only mean of individuals one by one, but of mankind in its organized and corporate state. It is therefore of the revolt of society from the authority of God that I am about to speak.
I have said before, that the history of the Christian society of the world may be divided into three periods: the first, when the Church as a spiritual society stood alone, separate from the world, and made up of individuals gathered from all nations, cities, and households, as a spiritual society without contact with the civil or political society of mankind; the second, when the Church and the civil society of the world, being in harmony and union, after the Empire had become Christian, were associated together in the government and sanctification of the world; the third is the period which for the last three hundred years has set in, of divorce, departure, and separation, between the spiritual society of the Church and the civil or political society of nations. Or in other words, the first period since the coming of our Lord may be called the period of the world under false gods, for the world was heathen; the second was the period of the world under the one true God; and this last period, on which we have now entered, I am afraid must be truly and justly named the world without God, the world departing from the true God.
The other day a book fell into my hands, describing the progress of the world in these three divisions. The writer says that there are three chief cities which have affected the destinies of the civilized world. The first is Jerusalem, from which the Law, the religion of Israel, flowed by tradition into the world. The second is the city of Rome, which, as the writer said--he was certainly not a Catholic, and I believe not a Christian, and if he were not of the house of Israel, I believe he must have been a sceptic--was the source of the Christian and Catholic religion, and of the society which belongs to the Middle Ages. The third city is the city of Paris, the new Jerusalem, the leader of civilization, the city of progress, and the city of the future. While I recite these words, your own thoughts are beginning so make their application.
At the outset of these subjects I said that the Syllabus, published by the Sovereign Pontiff some six or eight years ago, seems to have turned the world upside down. It has created commotion among peoples and kingdoms, governments and legislatures, newspapers and politicians, of whom perhaps not one in a hundred has seen even the outside of the Syllabus, and certainly not one in ten would take time to understand its meaning. This Syllabus is supposed to be a violent and medieval aggression upon the civil order of the world. Let me tell you simply what the Syllabus is. The Gospel of Jesus Christ--that is, Christianity--reveals a multitude of truths, and lays down a multitude of laws. Now, the world has been perpetually denying these truths, and violating these laws, both intellectually and in act. The Syllabus is a collection of eighty condemnations. Eighty of the chief intellectual and moral errors which have sprung up in the modern world, contrary to the faith and morals of Christianity have been condemned, as they arose, by the Head of the Church in express and explicit terms. The Syllabus is a summary of those condemnations. For example, I will recite to you five of the errors that are therein condemned.
They are as follows: first of all, that the civil society of man--that is, the political order of civil society--is the fountain and origin of all right, and that it can be circumscribed by no authority; secondly, that in conflicts between the spiritual and civil authorities, the civil authority is supreme, and must determine; thirdly, that education belongs to the State, as being what is called matter of civil competence, and ought to be strictly secular; fourthly, that kings and princes are exempt from ecclesiastical jurisdiction; lastly, that the State ought to be separated from the Church, and the Church from the State (Syllabus Pii IX., Propp. 39, 42, 45, 54, 55). Now, these are five of the errors which are condemned in the Syllabus; and you will easily understand that the remaining seventy-five propositions of the Syallabus are errors similar in kind. What I purpose to do is, incidentally, and without again reciting them, to show that these are five falsehoods, and are justly condemned.
There is a common axiom that passes from mouth to mouth in these days, that religion and politics have nothing to do with each other--that the Church has nothing to do with politics; that the Church must submit to the civil authorities as supreme; that politics may go their own way by themselves, and that priests and bishops, if they touch politics, go beyond their limits and exceed their powers. We hear a great deal of this talk.
Now, in the name of not only Christianity, but of common sense, I would ask you to consider for one moment the following questions: Is not the law of morals the same for a thousand men as for one? Is not the law of morals the same for a nation as for an individual? Are men bound by the moral law one by one, and are nations and kingdoms not bound by the moral law? Is it to be supposed that individuals, one by one, are under obligation to keep the law of God, and that states and kingdoms are not so bound? Are peasants bound to keep the law of the Gospel and of the Church, and are princes and kings not bound to keep that law? Are individuals who happen to be poor and unlearned under the obligation to obey Christian morality, and are not legislatures and executive governments equally obliged? Nay, I will say more; are they not more strictly bound and under heavier responsibility to conform themselves to the moral law? Well, then, whence comes the moral law? From reason and from Christianity; from the light of reason elevated and perfected by the Christian revelation. And to whose custody was the Christian revelation committed? To the Apostles and their successors, to whom our Lord said: "Go ye, and make disciples of all nations: teaching them to observe whatsoever I have commanded you."
Who, then, are the guardians of the moral law? The Apostles and their successors. And who are their successors? The pastors of the Church of God. And the things which He commanded include His moral precepts as well as the doctrines of Faith; and they bind individuals, and peoples, and nations, and kingdoms, and those who rule over them. To talk about the separation between religion and politics is to talk at random in those who know no better; it is to talk impiety, or it is to talk apostacy, in those who have understanding; for what are politics but the morals of society, the morals of men collected and living together under public law? The same law which governs the individual governs households, and the law that governs households governs the State. The legislature is as much bound to observe the moral law of the Gospel as the individual, as any private man; and therefore politics, so far from being separate, are a part of morals. They are morals applied to the public society of men, to the public action of nations, to the legislation of governments, to the executive authority of princes; for which reason, to attempt to separate between religion and politics, to shut up the priest, as it is said, in the sacristy, is a revolt of the world endeavoring to shake off the yoke of Jesus Christ. If He be the King of the world, which He has redeemed with His precious blood, He will judge the kings and the princes and the legislatures and the nations of this world for the laws which they have made. And this is our present subject.
1. First of all, then, what is human society, or the political society of the world; and who created it? We read in histories, that such a one was the founder of this kingdom, and such another was the founder of that empire; but they did not create the society. The civil order, or political society of man, is the creation of God. The God of nature, in the day in which He created man, created him with an innate necessity of living a social life. Society sprang from our first parents. As soon as the family arose, the outlines of the political order were traced upon the earth. In the multiplication of men and of families, sprang up the civil and political order of the world; and that civil and political order, whatsoever form it may take, and howsoever it may be modified, has in it three immutable principles. It has the principle of authority, which rules; it has the principle of obedience, which subjects those who are under authority to its government; it has the principle of equal and reciprocal justice between those who are united under the same authority. These three principles are the principles of the family, and of the household, and of the whole civil and political order of the world. They may be variously clothed; they may be embodied in different forms of law, according to ages and nations; but essentially all governments and constitutions resolve themselves at last into these three simple laws. It is of this that the Holy Ghost, speaking by the Apostle, says: "Let every soul be subject to higher powers; for there is no power but from God; and those that are, are ordained of God. He that resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God; and they that resist, purchase to themselves damnation. For princes are not a terror to the good work, but to the evil.
Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good. If thou do that which is evil, fear; for he beareth not the sword in vain. For he is God's minister: an avenger to execute wrath upon him that doth evil (Rom. xiii. 1)." From what other source could the authority to inflict capital punishment be derived, save only from Him who is the Author and Giver of life? Society recognizes the Divine foundation of its authority every time that justice condemns a man to die. This authority is not of human creation; it is of Divine creation. It comes from God; and civil society is therefore in itself of Divine foundation. In the order of nature, it has God for its Author. Sovereignty, then, was immediately committed by God to the society of mankind, in the act of creating it. The particular form of government, whether it be by one or by many, whether it be empire or kingdom or republic--these mutable and incidental forms of government may be determined by man; but the authority which they embody, and by which alone they exist, is always from God. Now, such is civil society. Bear in mind the principles we have laid down; because upon them all depends; all public morality and all public law, the duty of loyalty and of civil obedience, the power of capital punishment, and the mutual justice between man and man. To call in question the Divine foundation of authority, and to talk only of the rights of men, is to violate the first laws of human society. We are in the century of revolutions, inaugurated by the gospel of the rights of man and of the sovereignty of the people, preached by the false prophets of this world to deceive the nations.
Men have come to believe that the freak and caprice of the public will is sovereign, and may at any time revoke the authority which God has providentially ordained in the powers that are. The word of God declares that authority is from God, and that they who resist the authority purchase to themselves damnation. Now, that supreme civil authority, being of God's own creating, is sacred, and was not left in the world to reel and to stagger in the darkness and instability of human ignorance and human license. When God became incarnate, He founded His own kingdom in the world; He instituted an authority in which are incorporated the rights of God; He promulgated a law which governs the conscience of all mankind.
2. The kingdom of Jesus Christ is His Church one and universal, and by it He exercises His sovereignty over the nations. The commission of His Apostles was to found a universal kingdom, which should never be destroyed; of which the prophet has said, "It shall not be delivered up to another people (Daniel ii. 44.)." Empires have passed from people to people, kingdoms have vanished from off the face of the earth; but the kingdom of Jesus Christ can never pass to any hand from that which was pierced on Calvary. His kingdom shall endure to all eternity. The Church of God on earth is a true kingdom, reigning by its own right. It has a right to its own existence, to its own possessions, to its own legislature, to its own executive, and to its own tribunals. It receives these prerogatives neither from king, nor prince, nor people; and no human authority can circumscribe its limits. Nay, it circumscribes the limits of all other authority, and is itself subject to none but God only. When the Church came into this world, it suffered its ten persecutions. The world, if it had been possible, would have stifled it in its own blood; but an indefectible life cannot perish. For three hundred years it spread, and penetrated and pervaded the whole civil society of the world: it entered into households, and peoples, and nations, and cities, and kingdoms. It reached, at last, to the palace of the Caesars; it took possession of the imperial family; it converted the emperor on his throne: and when it had prevaded the senate, and the tribunals, and the whole civil life of Rome, the empire was elevated above itself. It became regenerate by grace, and lived by a new life, and was guided by new laws and confirmed by new authorities; and the civil society of the world was born again.
That which God had created in the natural state was elevated, by its union with the Church, to the supernatural order; the members of it were regenerated by water and the Holy Ghost, and became members of the kingdom of God, illuminated by faith under the guidance of the pastors of the Universal Church and the Vicar of Jesus Christ. Then came to pass a change so terrible, that the world does not contain in history anything more fearful. Rome, which had governed the world by its laws, and its warfare, and its civilization, was purged by fire, and by blood. The kingdom of Jesus Christ then took possession of the civil society of the world. Then passed away the old civilization, which was corrupt to the very marrow; so corrupt, that nothing could have changed it but the baptism of fire, by which it was cleansed. The most terrible judgments of God fell upon Rome, upon the city and upon the provinces of the Roman Empire. They were purged by wars, massacres, and pestilence; the old world was burned down to the roots, that the new civilization and the new Christian world might spring from the earth purified by fire.
And nothing could be more beautiful, nothing more like to the vision of the Heavenly City, than the rise of this Christian civilization. When, in the love of God, slavery began to melt away; when fathers with horror cast from them the power of life and death over their children and their slaves as a thing too hideous for Christian men; when husbands renounced with thanksgiving to their Redeemer the power of life and death over wives; when the horrors, and injustice, and abominations of the pagan domestic life gave place to the charities of Christian homes, then the whole world was lifted to a higher sphere. It had come under the light and jurisdiction of the sovereignty of Jesus Christ. Such was the growth of the world; beginning, I will say, from the time of St. Gregory the Great, the apostle of our Christianity, who reigned with a patriarchal sway over the three and-twenty patrimonies of the Church--over Italy and the north of Africa, and the coasts of the Adriatic, and the south of France, and Sicily, and the islands of the Mediterranean. This new Christian world was the germ of modern Europe. The Pontiffs laid the foundations of a world which is now passing away--a Christian commonwealth of nations, about which men vaunt themselves as if they were its saviours, though they never cease to destroy it.
3. And then came another epoch, when, in the solemnities of Christmasday of the year 800, St. Leo III. crowned Charlemagne at the tomb of the Apostle, and made him the Emperor of the West. That act, done in the midst of tribulation and danger, when the times were dark with all manner of evil, was the beginning of a new era. There sprang up in the world for some seven hundred years a Christendom in which the kings and princes of Europe acknowledged the sovereignty of Jesus Christ; the nations and the kingdoms served Him, and inherited the benediction promised to those that acknowledge His supreme rights. In order that we may better understand what, in those ages of faith, was the belief of men as to the civil power, let us look at the ceremony of the consecration of a king. Nowadays we hear of coronations, but we hear no more of the consecration of kings. But a coronation, even in the tradition of England, takes place in the old Abbey of Westminster, and with certain rights which remain, mutilated indeed, but taken chiefly from the ancient Catholic ritual. I will shortly describe what the ancient ritual was.
The prince who was to be consecrated, for three days before, fasted as a preparation. On the day of his consecration he came to the sanctuary of the church, where the metropolitan and his suffragans received him. He then, first upon his knees before the altar made solemn oath to Almighty God, to observe and cause to be observed, according to his knowledge and his power, for the sake of the Church and of his people, law, justice, and peace, according to the laws of the land and the canons of the Church. He then lay prostrate before the altar, like a bishop when he is consecrated; the litanies were chanted, the same litanies which are sung in our solemn ordinations. Then, kneeling before the altar, he received the unction. He was anointed in the right arm, which is the arm of strength, and on the shoulder, typical of royal power; as in the prophecy, "The government is upon His shoulder (Isaias ix. 6.)." He then received the sword, with this admonition, "Remember that the saints conquered kingdoms, not by the sword, but by faith." After this, the crown was put upon his head, with the prayer that he might wear it in mercy and in justice; and the sceptre was then placed in his hands, in token of the authority of law. After that, the Holy Mass was celebrated; and in that Mass he received the Holy Communion of the precious body and blood of Jesus Christ, from the hands of the consecrating bishop. These solemn acts in themselves portrayed what were the relations of Christian law and fidelity between the chief rulers of nations and of kingdoms, and the sovereignty of Jesus Christ.
4. Such was once the Christian world. What is it now? Look at Christian Europe. Read history for the last three hundred years. Briefly, for briefly it must be, I will touch upon its main points. Three hundred years ago, Germany and the greater part of northern Europe--Sweden, Norway, Denmark, England, Scotland, to say nothing of other smaller countries--separated themselves formally from the unity of the Faith and Church, and therein of the supreme authority of the Vicar of Jesus Christ. What straightway followed? The civil power, which until that time had been obedient to the laws of faith and of Christian morality, thenceforward went its way alone, choosing and determining for itself. The most terrible persecutions, to prison and to death, for the sake of religion, sprang up in every country; and the two authorities, civil and spiritual, which God has made distinct and has committed to separate hands, were united in the person of princes. The civil supremacy and the ecclesiastical supremacy were claimed for the crown, and civil rulers invested themselves with prerogatives which can be borne by the Vicar of Jesus Christ alone. The authority over conscience, religion, and the worship of God belongs only to those to whom He has committed it. Wheresoever the conscience and the soul enter in, man is free from all authority of men. No king, nor prince, nor legislature, has power to make law or ordinance over my conscience. He may take my life, but my faith he cannot touch. It was a violation of the Divine law: and bitterly and in blood the people that were torn from the unity of the Church suffered for that deed. I will say nothing of Ireland--the memories of Ireland are too mournful, too profoundly dark--but England, which then was united, which then had one faith and one worship, has been miserably rent, cut asunder in religion, until one half of the English people no longer belong to the religion which was set up by law three hundred years ago. And those who have separated from it are divided and subdivided again into innumerable religious fractions; and in that one body, which is held together by the law, what a dying out of faith, what denials of Christianity, what oppositions of teachers against each other, what separations, what bondage of conscience, what violations of Christian liberty! From what source are all these evils? From the usurpation of the civil authority, which assumed to itself to be the head and supreme judge in religion.
But I pass this by. These were only the beginning of troubles which fell upon the nations separated from the unity of the Church. There was also a flood of evils in countries that still continued to be of that unity. In France, in Austria, in parts of Italy, in Spain, in Portugal, princes who still professed to be Catholic, assumed authority to meddle with religion, with worship, with education, though not with faith. They did indeed profess that they could not touch faith; but discipline and all things outside of faith they claimed as subject to their jurisdiction.
I have said there is, in all countries, a disposition to depart from the unity of the Christian civilization which the providence of God has ordained. The conflicts which began three hundred years ago have been everywhere accomplishing themselves. In Austria some twenty years ago, in Italy the other day, it was declared that the Church and the State were no longer united; that is to say, that the sovereignty of Jesus Christ was no longer acknowledged by the civil power, and that the political order of the world was claimed by man for himself. The "kingdoms and the nations" would no longer serve the sovereignty of Jesus Christ. The other day, two laws were passed in Italy, the one to forbid the teaching of Christian doctrine (that is, the Catechism) in the schools of the poor, the other to forbid the teaching of theology in the universities of the kingdom.
5. Thus far, I have touched upon the creation of the civil power; secondly, upon its consecration by Christianity; thirdly, upon the harmony and union between the civil and the spiritual powers when united; fourthly, on the separation and divorce which has been accomplishing itself between them. I now come to the last point, which is a consequence of that divorce--the desecration of civil society, the stripping off, the effacing of the sacred and Christian character from all political institutions.
For clearness, I will give an example of what I mean; and I do it sadly, and with the greatest tenderness of sympathy. If any word I speak should seem to be wounding to noble, Christian, Catholic, chivalrous France, I disclaim beforehand whatever may seem to come from my lips. In the year 1789, as I told you the other night, was published to the world a document called the The Principles of the Rights of Man. I told you then, that in that document we find nothing about the duties of man, or the rights of God. The rights of man, indeed, are there; as if man were the lord and king of all things: as if he had no duties to anybody, and no one had rights over him. What was the consequence of this beginning? There were two of the greatest pestilences at that time spreading in France, the forerunners and causes of its downfall--the infidel philosophy of Voltaire, and the flagrant immorality of Rousseau; the two false prophets, who destroyed the one the faith, the other the morals of society. You will remember how the worship of Christianity was then abolished, the name of Jesus Christ blasphemed, the church of Notre Dame profaned; Reason, personified as my tongue refuses to describe, set upon the altar. Atheism took possession of men's minds, or rather of their lives. And there came a day when, as by a concession towards belief, the Assembly voted the existence of the Supreme Being. You know what followed: a reign of terror, blood, blasphemy; horrors beyond the imagination of man; revolutions in every city; civil war in the streets; an infidel empire. At last, Christianity was restored as a public policy; and no doubt, under that politic device, faithful men and faithful pastors began once more to do their work. Souls once more were saved; but the heart of faith was sick unto death.
Such was France for a long period of years; and the seeds of infidelity were cast far and wide. They sank so deep, that never to this day has Atheism been finally eradicated. In the midst of that noble, Christian, Catholic people, the roots of infidelity are now so deeply set, and the taint of indifferentism is so wide, that all the prayers, labors, sufferings of the faithful and fervent cannot restore to France its Christian laws, and the sovereignty of Jesus Christ. After awhile, came a restoration; you know with what results. I will not go into detail. We have seen, I think, some five revolutions, and in three of them blood running in the streets. But all this has passed away; and the horrors of the past are pale in the horrors before us at this moment. We used to look back upon the first French revolution as a time of such exquisite terror, that I, for my part, have often wondered how our forefathers could have endured the daily tidings of misery and blood so near to their doors; but you and I have been hearing worse, day by day, for weeks, and in this last week worse than all. The other day we read these words: "In a little while all religion will disappear from the schools of the Commune; the crucifix will disappear as a violation of liberty of Conscience." A little while afterwards there was a question whether or not the churches should be closed; and it was answered, "That the churches be kept open, and that in them Atheism shall be taught, to disabuse the minds of men from the prejudice of belief." And do we, then, wonder that the chief pastor of that flock and some score of his faithful clergy are cast into prison? and in this moment of horrible suspense God only knows whether they be among the living or the dead.
It is almost out of place to quote the words I now repeat; but they are so intensely horrible, that lest I should seem to exaggerate, I here transcribe them. They are from Comte, one of the false prophets who has been contributing to the ruin of France by the moral and intellectual action of his false philosophy for the last thirty years. He is held in honor by some in England, and has disciples among us, who teach the same intellectual enormities. These are his words:
"In the name of the past and the future, the servants of humanity, both its philosophical and practical servants --come forward to claim as their due the general direction of this world. Their object is to constitute at length a real Providence in all departments, moral, intellectual, and material. Consequently, they exclude once for all, from political supremacy, all the different servants of God, Catholic, Protestant, or Deist, as being at once behindhand and a cause of disturbance (Catechism of positive Religion, preface)."
It is more than time to make an end: I will therefore draw a general conclusion from what I have said, that the unimaginable horrors, of which Paris is at this moment the field, come from the revolt of civil society from God. They are the offspring, the legitimate, the lineal working out, of the principles of infidelity and impiety which were set in motion a century ago. And let statesmen and politicians lay to heart, that the first rising, in 1789, was a rising against the king and those that surrounded him; the next rising in 1830 and 1848, was of the middle class against those that were immediately above them; but the rising now is the rising of the masses, of the multitudes, who, having been neglected, outcast, and therefore morally outlawed, have been robbed of their Christian education. They have grown up a terrible generation, to be the scourge and the overthrow of civil society. I need not, then, repeat that Pius IX., in the Syllabus, taught wisely and well, that it is a falsehood, and an error to be condemned by Christian men, to say that the civil society of the world is the fountain and origin of all right, and cannot be circumscribed. The Church of God and God Himself are the fountain and the origin of rights higher than the civil state; and the authority of God and of His laws circumscribes the authority of the civil order.
Next, it is a falsehood, and an error justly condemned, to say that, when the spiritual and the civil authorities are in conflict, the contention shall be determined by the superior authority of the civil power. The spiritual authority of God and of the Christian laws must circumscribe and limit the claims of the civil authority. Thirdly, it is a falsehood and an error to say that education is a matter of civil competence and ought to be secular. The education of Christian men must be Christian. The education of baptized children must be according to the faith of their baptism. Nothing can educate the heart, the soul, and the conscience but the laws of God. Again, it is a falsehood and an error to say that kings and princes are exempt from the superior jurisdiction of God and of His Church. They are bound like others, and bound with a heavier responsibility than others, and will have to give a heavier reckoning before the tribunal of the King of kings. And lastly, to say that the Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church, is a falsehood and an error to be condemned; because, in the natural order, the State is God's creation, and, in the supernatural order, the Church is God's creation, and these two ought to be in harmony and in union. They ought to act in concord, co-operating with one another to the highest ends of man.
And now there are two plain truths which I will add by way of corollaries from all that I have said. The civil powers of the world, in separating themselves from the authority of God and of His Church, are committing suicide; it is political self-murder. They are condemning themselves to one of two inevitable results--either to the despotism of military dictators, or to the worst form of tyranny, the tyranny of revolutions. The civil powers of the world at this moment are standing between two great movements, and between them they must make their choice. There is, on the one hand, the One Holy Catholic Church, with its Divine authority, its Divine faith, its Divine laws, and its Divine obligations, spreading throughout the world, penetrating into all nations. This there is on one side--and this is in the noonday light. But there is on the other a society which is in the darkness of midnight: the deadly antagonist of the Church. It is one, because it is compactly united: it is unholy, for it springs from Satan: it is universal, for it is international; it is invisible because it is hid out of the sight of men; and that is the universal international revolution of secret societies, allied together for the common purpose of overturning, if it were possible (as it is not,) the Church of God, and of overturning (as it is easily possible) all civil governments on earth. Between these two alternatives, the civil rulers of to-day have to make their choice. "O ye kings, understand: receive instruction, you that judge the earth (Ps. ii. 10)." The choice is before you; civil life or death: choose promptly, that you may live.
But, I fear, the choice is already made. If there be one thing that has been derided, scoffed at, cast out, misrepresented, in these last twenty years, it is the Temporal Power of the Pope. Yet what is it but the recognition of the sovereignty of Jesus Christ over men and over races, over public, law, over the whole of Christendom--the recognition that there is a King in heaven, Who is represented upon earth, and that on earth there is one from whom the interpretation of His law, and the sentence of His truth, comes with supreme authority? In this person alone are united together the two authorities, civil and spiritual; in order that, in all other nations of the world, those two authorities shall be separate: so that tyranny over the consciences of men and violation of the freedom of religious conviction shall be rendered impossible, because kings and princes and rulers are limited by a superior authority in all things that are spiritual. And inasmuch as that supreme spiritual authority has been, by Divine Providence, in a visible and marvellous manner, freed from all subjection to emperors or kings, having a perfect independence of his own, owing only to his Divine Master in heaven the account that he must give--that Providence of God is being visibly justified at this moment by the revolutions, now assailing all countries which have cast off their allegiance to the Christian Church. I see no hope for the Christian civilization of the world, unless men turn back again to the true foundation of Christian society, and acknowledge that this dark and bitter period of revolution has sprung from a rising against the authority of the Church of God, and that revolt and unbelief are the curse and scourge of Europe.
In the beginning I said that this subject, though it seems to be of a public and political kind, is also intrinsically moral and religious. It comes home to our consciences. Tomorrow, it may be, in the first newspaper that falls in your way, you will hear the principles of which I have been speaking denied and denounced. It is necessary, therefore, that we should, from time to time, turn back again to these great laws and principles of faith. They sprang from faith, and they belong to the morality of faith.
I have said these things because I am convinced that it is necessary you should be on your guard. Do not be deceived by the silvery sounds of "liberty," of "freedom," of "public rights," of "the rights of man," and of those rights which I spoke of last time, and for very shame will not utter again. Be on your guard. Do not be seduced or carried away by the talk and clamor of a revolting and unbelieving age. Remember the words of the Son of God: "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free (St. John viii. 32. )." "If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed (Ibid. 36.)."
Liberty without Jesus Christ is the worst of bondage. The service of Jesus Christ is true liberty. Remember His own words: "Come to Me, all you that labor, and are burdened, and I will refresh you. Take up My yoke upon you, and learn of Me; because I am meek, and humble of heart, and you shall find rest for your souls. For My yoke is sweet, and My burden light (St. Matt. xi. 28-30)." This alone is the way of liberty. Liberty is in the heart. True liberty is in the service of Him who must "reign until He hath put all His enemies under His feet (1 Cor. xv. 25.)."
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[Emphasis - mine]