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 Four great evils of the day. By Henry Ed 
 
 Clin 
 
 3 1924 029 345 265 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://archive.org/details/cu31924029345265 
 
FOUR GREAT EYILS OF THE DAY. 
 
THE 
 
 FOUR GEEAT EVILS OF THE DAY. 
 
 HENRY EDWARD, 
 
 CABDINAL ARCHBISHOP OP WESTMINSTER. 
 
 FIFTH EDITION. 
 
 LONDON: BURNS AND GATES, iv. 
 NKW YORK : CATHOLIC PUBLICATION SOCIETY CO. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Eevolt of the Intellect against God. . i 
 
 LECTITEE II. 
 
 The Revolt of the Will against God . . 37 
 
 LECTURE III- 
 Thb Revolt of Society prom God . , • 7 1 
 
 LECTURE IV 
 
 The Spirit of Antichrist . . . 104 
 
The four following Lectures are now printed, 
 in compliance with the request of many who 
 desired their publication. They are printed as 
 they were taken down, with only such correc- 
 tions as were necessary for the sake of clear- 
 ness. 
 
LECTURE I. 
 
 THE REVOLT OP THE INTELLECT AGAINST GOD. 
 
 ' Butyet the Son of Man, when He cometh, shall He find, 
 think you, faith on earth f St. Luke xviii. 8. 
 
 By this question our Divine Lord intends us to 
 understand that, when He comes, He shall find 
 many who do not believe, many who have fallen 
 from the faith. It foretells that there shall be 
 apostasies ; and if apostasies, therefore that He 
 shall still find the truth; but He will find also those 
 that have fallen from it. And this is what the 
 Holy Ghost, speaking by the Apostle, has dis- 
 tinctly prophesied. St. Paul says, 'Now the Spirit 
 manifestly saith that, in the last times, some 
 shall depart from the faith, giving heed to spirits 
 of error, and doctrines of devils.'' And again, St. 
 
 » 1 Tim. iv. 1. 
 
 B 
 
2 THE REVOLT OF THE INTELLECT 
 
 John says, ' Little cliildreii, it is the last hotir ; 
 and as you have heard that Antichrist cometh, 
 even now there are become many Antichrists, 
 whereby we know that it is the last hour.'^ The 
 meaning therefore of our Lord is this ; not that 
 when He comes He will not find the Church He 
 founded in all the plenitude of its power, and the 
 faith He revealed in all the fulness of its doctrine. 
 ' The city seated upon the hill cannot be hid.' The 
 Holy Catholic Church is the ' light of the world,' 
 and so shall be to the end. It can never be sepa- 
 rated from its Divine Head in heaven. The Spirit 
 of Truth, who came on the day of Pentecost, ac- 
 cording to our Divine Lord's promise, will abide 
 with it for ever : therefore when the Son of God 
 sb-^ll come at the end of the world, there shall be 
 His Church as in the beginning, in the amplitude 
 of its Divine authority, in the fulness of its Divine 
 faith, and the immutability of its teaching. He 
 will find then the light shining in vain in the 
 midst of many who will be willingly blind ; the 
 teacher in the midst of multitudes, of whom many 
 will be willingly deaf: they will have eyes, and 
 see not ; and ears, and hear not ; and hearts that 
 2 1 St. John u. 18. 
 
AGAINST GOD. 3 
 
 will not understand. As it was at His first com- 
 ing, so shall it be at His second. This, then, is the 
 plain meaning of our Lord's words. 
 
 And now, before I enter upon this subject, I 
 wish to say a word of a superstition which, strange 
 to say, pervades those who are willing to believe 
 but little else. For in its incredulity the human 
 mind is liable to fall into the greatest of all credu- 
 lities ; and one credulous superstition of these days 
 is this : That faith and reason are at variance ; 
 that the human reason, by submitting itself to faith, 
 becomes dwarfed ; that faith interferes with the 
 rights of reason ; that it is a violation of its pre- 
 rogatives, and a diminution of its perfection. 
 Now I call this a pure superstition; and those 
 who pride themselves upon being men of illumin- 
 ation and of high intellect, or, as we have heard 
 lately, in the language of modern Gnosticism, 
 'men of culture,' are, after all, both credulous 
 and superstitious. 
 
 God, who is the perfect and infinite intelli- 
 gence — that is, the infinite and perfect reason — 
 created man to His own likeness, and gave him a 
 reasonable intelligence, like His own. As the face 
 in the mirror answers to the face of the beholder, 
 
4 THE REVOLT OF THE INTELLECT 
 
 eo the intelligence of man answers to the intelli- 
 gence of God. It is His own likeness. What, then, 
 is the revelation of faith, but the illumination of 
 the Divine reason poured mit upon the reason 
 of man ? The revelation of faith is no discovery 
 which the reason of man has made for himself by 
 induction, or by deduction, or by analysis, or by 
 synthesis, or by logical process, or by experimental 
 chemistry. The revelation of faith is a discovery 
 of itself by the Divine Reason, the unveiling of the 
 Divine Intelligence, and the illumination flowing 
 from it cast upon the intelligence of man ; and if 
 so, I would ask, how can there be variance or 
 discord ? How can the illumination of the faith 
 diminish the stature of the human reason ? How 
 can its rights be interfered withl How can its 
 prerogatives be violated t Is not the truth the 
 very reverse of all this ? Is it not the fact that 
 the human reason is perfected and elevated above 
 itself by the illumination of faith ? 
 
 There have been three periods of the human 
 reason in the history of mankind. The first period 
 was when the reason of man wandered alone, 
 without revelation, as we see in the heathen 
 world, and most especially in the two most cul- 
 
AGAINST GOD. 5 
 
 tivated races of the heathen world ; I mean the 
 Greek and the Roman. The second period "vvaa 
 that in which the human reason, receiving the 
 light of revelation, walked under the guidance of 
 faith ; that is to say, by the revelation of God of old 
 to His prophets, and by His revelation through the 
 incarnation of His Son in Christianity. Lastly, 
 there is a period setting in — not for the whole 
 world, not for the Church of God, but for indi- 
 viduals, races, and nations — of a departure from 
 faith, in which the human reason will have to 
 wander once more alone, without guide or cer- 
 tainty ; not indeed as it did before, but, as I shall be 
 compelled hereafter to show, in a worse state, in 
 a state which is in truth a dwarfing and a degra- 
 dation of the human intelligence. 
 
 The first state, then, in which the reason of man 
 wandered without revelation was the state of the 
 heathen world. They had no knowledge of God, 
 except by an obscured tradition, which came 
 dimly from the beginning. But the condition of 
 the human reason under faith is an elevated and 
 a nobler state. No man can read the Old Testa- 
 ment — the Book of Psalms, the Book of Proverbs, 
 to say nothing of the prophetical books of the 
 
6 THE EEVOLT OF THE INTELLECT 
 
 Old Testament — without perceiving at once that, 
 in the most elaborate literature of Greece and 
 Rome, there is nothing which, for intellectual 
 elevation, refinement, and power, is comparable 
 with them. When we come on to the period 
 of Christianity, I may say, in one word, that the 
 liistory of the progress and the perfection of the 
 human intellect is the history of Christianity it- 
 self; and that Christianity has elevated, cultivated, 
 developed, invigorated, and perfected the human 
 intellect. Apart from all hopes of eternal life, 
 and in its mere effect on this world, upon man 
 as man, as a rational being, faith has been his 
 elevation. Lastly, we come to that period of which 
 it is my purpose now to speak. St. Paul, writing 
 to the Thessalonians, says : ' Be not easily moved 
 from your mind, nor be frighted, neither by spu-it, 
 nor by word, nor by epistle, as sent from us, as if 
 the day of the Lord were at hand;' because, he 
 says, that it shall not come ' unless there come a 
 revolt first, and the man of sin be revealed, the 
 son of perdition, who opposeth, and is lifted up 
 above all that is called God, or that is wor- 
 shipped.'' 
 
 « 2 Thees. ii. 2-4. 
 
AGAINST GOD. 7 
 
 Now, I am not going to enter into the ques- 
 tion of when that day will come ; that is not a 
 part of the message committed to me. Neither 
 am T going to enter into an exposition of unful- 
 filled prophecies about the man of sin. But out 
 of this epistle I take one word and one idea. Be- 
 fore that day comes there shall be ' a revolt.' 
 Now, a revolt means a rebellion, a rising, a cast- 
 ing-ofi" of obedience, and the erection of a self-con- 
 stituted authority in its place. I will try to bring 
 before you the signs and marks of this rising or 
 revolt of the intellect of men that were once 
 Christians, and to show that the intelligence of 
 Christian nations has, in these last ages, begun to 
 manifest the phenomena and signs of a departure 
 from faith, which, though it can in no way affect 
 the immutability, stability, and imperishable cer- 
 tainty of the revelation of truth, any more than 
 blindness can cloud the sun at noon-day, never- 
 theless shows that there is a current carry- 
 ing the minds of men away from faith in Christ 
 and in God into the darkness of unbelief. 
 
 1. First of all, there exists at this day, and there 
 has existed for two centuries, a certain number of 
 men — few indeed — who profess themselves to be 
 
8 THE REVOLT OF THE INTELLECT 
 
 Atheists, or not to believe ttie existence of God. 
 I am sorry to say we have among us a certain 
 number of such men who, by their speeches and 
 writingo, profess this, which I must call not only a 
 blasphemous but a stupid impiety. I call it stupid 
 for this reason. A man whom Englishmen are fond 
 of calling the greatest philosophical intellect that 
 England ever produced, in one of his essays has used 
 these words. Quoting the Book of Psalms, he says, 
 ' The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.' 
 It is not said, ' The fool hath thought in his heart :' 
 that is, the fool did say so in his heart, be- 
 cause he hoped there might be no God. He did 
 not say it in his head, because he knew better. 
 And this explanation is exactly what the Apostle 
 has written, speaking of the ancient world : ' The 
 invisible things of Him, from the creation of the 
 world, are clearly seen, being understood by the 
 things that are made : His eternal power also and 
 divinity : so that they' (that is, the nations who 
 know not God) ' are inexcusable ;' ' for, professing 
 themselves to be wise, they became fools.'* And he 
 goes on to explain the reason of it ; ' as they liked 
 not to have God in their knowledge:' they had no 
 * Eom. i. 20, 22. 
 
AGAINST GOD. 9 
 
 love, no liking for Him ; there was no moral sym- 
 pathy with His periections of purity, justice, mercy, 
 sanctity, and truth. These things were out of har- 
 mony with their degraded nature ; and because they 
 had no love to retain this knowledge of a pure and 
 holy God, therefore their intellects were darkened. 
 And yet, notwithstanding all this, even these, 
 who not knowing God, and not glorifying Him as 
 God, worshipped and served the creature more 
 than the Creator, these were not Atheists. So 
 far from it, they were Polytheists : they believed 
 in a multitude of gods. So profoundly rooted in 
 human nature was a belief in God, that when they 
 lost the knowledge of the one only true God, 
 they multiplied for themselves a number of false 
 gods. The human mind was incapable of con- 
 ceiving the perfection of the one only true God, 
 and it divided the Divine idea into a multitude of 
 gods; but it was so profusely and instinctively 
 filled with the notion of the existence of God, 
 that it multiplied God, instead of rejecting His ex- 
 istence. The heathen world, therefore, is a wit- 
 ness and a testimony to the existence of God. It 
 became superstitious, credulous, anything you will, 
 but atheistic it could not be. Nay, more than 
 
10 THE REVOLT OF THE INTELLECT 
 
 this : even the learned men, the more refined and 
 the more cultivated, they also did not reject the 
 notion of God; they became Pantheists, that is to 
 say, they invested everything vsrith divinity. The 
 thought of God vs^as so kindred to their nature, it 
 had such a response in them, their intellect and 
 their conscience testified with such constant accord 
 to the reasonableness of believing in God, or in 
 gods, that they invested all things round about 
 them with a participation in the Divine nature. 
 How, then, has it come to pass that men, in these 
 last times, after receiving the illumination of the 
 Faith, and knowing ' the only true God, and Jesus 
 Christ whom He has sent,' knowing Him in His per- 
 fections, in His attributes, and by His works and 
 grace, — that they should have fallen lower, I must 
 say, than even the heathen world, that they should 
 have come to deny the very existence of God? 
 
 They are, indeed, few in number ; but, never- 
 theless, they are active and full of zeal to propa- 
 gate their opinions. In France there exists a school 
 of Atheism which has a few disciples also in Eng- 
 land ; I mean the Positivist school of philosophy. 
 The founder of it, Comte, taught that the human 
 intellect has three periods : the first is the period 
 
AGAINST GOD. 11 
 
 of childhood, the second is the period of youth, 
 and the third the period of manhood. Now, it 
 says the period of childhood is the theological 
 period, in which the human reason believes in gods 
 or in God. The second period of the human reason 
 is that which the founder of this school of philo- 
 sophy calls the metaphysical period ; and here is 
 a refinement well worthy of note. He says, when 
 men are men, they give up the superstition of be- 
 lieving in God; nevertheless, they fall into the su- 
 perstition of believing in cause and effect, in law 
 and priticiple, that is, in the metaphysical concep- 
 tions which are intrinsic through the inevitable 
 action of the human reason. He treats these as 
 superstitions. As the belief in God was a theo- 
 logical superstition, so the belief in cause and ef- 
 fect, and consequence, and principle, and law — all 
 this is a metaphysical superstition. Well, the third 
 state of the human reason, which is the perfect 
 state of manhood, in what does it consist? In 
 believing that which we can see, feel, touch, handle, 
 test, weigh, measure, or analyse by chemistry. 
 We may test the facts, but we must not connect 
 them together. We must not say that one thing 
 follows after another by a law, or is caused by it. 
 
12 THE REVOLT OF THE INTELLECT 
 
 An explosion of fire-damp is not caused by the 
 candle being carried into the pit ; it follows after 
 the carrying of it into the pit, but it is a meta- 
 physical superstition to believe that it is caused 
 by it. This is what is called the scientific state 
 of the human mind. And this scientific state of 
 the human mind is when, having pushed over the 
 horizon and out of sight the idea of God, the idea 
 of cause and effect, of law and principle, and all 
 mental philosophy, we are reduced to this — that we 
 may count and number and distinguish the things 
 we see as phenomena and facts, but we must not 
 connect them together, we must not form concep- 
 tions as to why they follow one upon another. 
 And this is Science, the perfection of human rea- 
 son I The immediate result of this, of necessity, is 
 Atheism. I would ask, Is this the elevation of 
 the human reason 1 Does this Philosophy dignify, 
 or perfect, or exalt, or unfold it, or confer upon it 
 knowledge greater than it had before "? If there 
 can be anything which dwarfs, and stunts, and 
 diminishes, and distorts the human reason, it is 
 this. Atheism, then, is a lower abasement of the 
 intellect than was ever reached by the heathen 
 world. More than this, it is a degradation and 
 
AGAINST GOD. 13 
 
 distortion of the human intelligence ; and in pro- 
 portion as the human intelligence departs from 
 the knowledge of God, in that same degree it de- 
 parts from its own perfection. Nevertheless, this 
 school does exist among us; and this is the first 
 form, or rather the worst form, of the revolt of 
 the intellect, because it is the revolt of the intel- 
 lect from God altogether, from His existence, and 
 from all that He has made known to us by the 
 light of revelation, and even from that which He 
 has made known to us by the light of natm-e, 
 which is the light of reason. 
 
 2. Secondly, there is another and a modified 
 form of this revolt. There are men (and I am sorry 
 to say they are more numerous than the last) who, 
 though they do not reject the existence of God, do 
 nevertheless reject the knowledge of God; that is, 
 they profess to believe in a God, because they see 
 with all mankind (except a few who are isolated 
 and abnormal) that the light of reason, the light 
 of nature itself, obliges a man to believe in a first 
 cause, and that this first cause must be a personal 
 cause, an intelligence, and a will. To doubt of 
 this is, as I said before, to be an anomaly in the 
 rational order of man. But, while these men be- 
 
14 THE REVOLT OF THE INTELLECT 
 
 lieve in a God of nature, nevertheless they reject 
 the revelation which He has given them of Himself. 
 And how did they come to this state ? Not all at 
 once. They came by progressive stages ; and I 
 protest that, in what I am about to say, I say it 
 in a sorrow which I cannot put in words, still 
 more, without the least tinge of controversy ; be- 
 cause the longer I live, and the more I see of the 
 state of our own country, the less am I disposed 
 to utter one word which can make wider the 
 unhappy divisions which exist among those who 
 still believe in Christianity as a Divine revelation. 
 Nevertheless, I must tell the truth. The first cause 
 of Rationalism (that is, the rejection of Christianity 
 in the present day) was the rejection of the Di- 
 vine authority of the Church of Jesus Christ three 
 hundred years ago : and that by a law of produc- 
 tion so legitimate, by an intellectual law so certain, 
 that, I think, any one who would give himself suf- 
 ficient time and apply sufficient industry to follow 
 the history of unbelief in the last three hundred 
 years would see it to demonstration. When, three 
 hundred years back, certain nations in the north 
 and west of Europe had rejected the authority of 
 the Church as a Divine teacher, they immediately 
 
AGAINST GOD, 15 
 
 began to examine the human evidences upon which 
 the doctrines of Christianity reposed. Christian- 
 ity can only rest either upon a Divine authority — 
 that is, a Divine basis of certainty — or upon a 
 human and historical basis. Having rejected the 
 Divine authority, or the Divine basis, they had 
 nothing left to them but the human and historical 
 basis; and that huaaan and historical basis was 
 the history of Christianity as found in the inspired 
 books of Holy Scripture and in the works of 
 uninspired writers. They began to apply human 
 reason to criticise, to test, to measure the credi- 
 bility, both extrinsic and intrinsic, of every article 
 of the Faith. I say, first, the extrinsic credibility ; 
 that is, whether it could be historically proved 
 that this or that doctrine was believed in the be- 
 ginning and has been believed ever since : se- 
 condly, the intrinsic credibility; that is to say, 
 whether this or that doctrine was in itself recon- 
 cilable with the human reason. And applying this 
 critical test, they rejected doctrine after doctrine. 
 AVe all know how many fragmentary Christianities 
 sprung from what was called the Reformation, 
 differing from each other; the German form of 
 the Reformation differing from the English, the 
 
1() THE REVOLT OF THE INTELLECT 
 
 Englisli diiFering from the Scotch, and the Swiss 
 from both. These fi-agmentary Christianities were 
 so many exhibitions of the criticism of the human 
 reason working out for itself what seemed to be 
 credible or probable as to the original revelation 
 of God. 
 
 It was not difficult to foresee that one man 
 would go farther than another, that one would 
 reject more than another; and that one man would 
 begin early in life believing a great deal more than 
 he believed at the end of it, and therefore that 
 all things would be in a perpetual flux of muta- 
 tion and uncertainty ; so that for three hundred 
 years the amount of Christianity that has been 
 believed on this human and critical basis has been 
 perpetually diminishing, and the residuum which 
 is left upon that foundation now is incalculably less 
 than that with which men started three hundred 
 years ago. I hardly like to go into positive proofs 
 of this, for fear ofwounding where I desire to leave 
 no wound; but it is only this last week when, in 
 one of the highest places of this realm, evidence 
 was quoted from a most unsuspicious and impar- 
 tial correspondent, writing from Germany, who de- 
 clared the state of religious belief in that country 
 
AGAINST GOD. 17 
 
 to be such that neither Rome nor Luther would 
 recognise it as Christianity. And yet that was 
 a country in which, only three hundred years ago, 
 before the intellectual revolt against the Divine 
 authority of Faith arose, Christianity was once 
 perfect. Of England, I had rather not speak at 
 all. I pray every day of my life for England. I 
 never say the Holy Mass without praying earnestly 
 that light may be poured out over England, and 
 that the eyes of men may be purged of their film, 
 to see that they are contendiag one with another 
 to the destruction of their common inheritance ; 
 and that we may one day be all united again, 
 in the unity of the only Faith as it is in Jesus. 
 This is my prayer, and I desire most earnestly 
 to refrain from saying a word which can cause 
 the least estrangement in any one who hears me. 
 But is it not undeniable that at this moment 
 Christianity in England is being undermined ? Is 
 it not certain that Rationalism in every form, 
 whether speculative and cultivated, or gross and 
 vulgar, is, in every generation that passes, ex- 
 panding and establishing itself more widely among 
 the people of England? Moreover, I am old enough 
 to know that, forty years ago, men believed more 
 
 c 
 
IS THE REVOLT OF THE INTELLECT 
 
 than they believe now, that doctrines were then 
 held as indisputable which are now openly dis- 
 puted. 
 
 The rejection of the Divine authority neces- 
 warily throws men upon the only alternative — 
 human criticism applied to Scripture, to antiquity, 
 to Fathers, to history, to Councils, and to the acts 
 of the Holy See. There is nothing on the face 
 of the earth which the human reason does not 
 claim to subject to itself, to sit in judgment upon, 
 to test as if it were the creation of man, to de- 
 cide its credibility as if man were the measure of 
 truth, to pronounce upon whetherit be Divine or not. 
 The result of this anarchy of criticism is, that mul- 
 iitudes of men have rejected Christianity alto- 
 gether : men, whom but a few years ago I knew 
 firmly to believe in Christianity, are now, to my 
 certain knowledge, Rationalists. They now be- 
 lieve nothing of Christianity, because, having ap- 
 plied the false principle of human criticism to the 
 matter of Divine revelation, they have logically 
 and consistently carried out the application of a 
 false premiss, to the destruction of Christianity 
 altogether. The premiss is false, its result is 
 logical|. 
 
AGAINST GOD. 19 
 
 Let US now apply to this subject the teaching 
 of the Syllabus. Two of the errors condemned 
 in it are, 
 
 1st. ' That the human reason, without any re- 
 gard to the revelation of God, is the sole and suf- 
 ficient judge of truth and of falsehood, of right and 
 of wrong, and is a law of itself and in itself, suf- 
 ficient for the welfare of individuals and of states.' 
 
 2d. ' That the human reason is the source of all 
 the truths of religion.'* 
 
 In the beginning of the last century, there was 
 a book written called Christianity as old as the 
 Creation. I need not tell you that that book con- 
 tained no Christianity. It denied all supernatural 
 revelation, and professed to show that all truth 
 was in the natural reason of man. If we should 
 desire to see the fruit of these principles, we may 
 go back to the end of the last century. See what 
 Paris was in the year 1793 ; see what Paris is 
 again in the year 1871. Tell me whether the 
 human reason, without Christianity, is a law ol 
 itself, and the sole judge of truth and falsehood, 
 and of right and wrong, and sufficient for the 
 welfare of individuals and of states. It was only 
 * Syllabus, Prop. iii. iv. 
 
20 THE REVOLT OF THE INTELLECT 
 
 yesterday I read in a public despatch from Paris, 
 that the Commune had decreed that all religious 
 teaching should cease in the schools. We know 
 that the churches, which a short time ago were 
 employed for sacred uses, are now political clubs, 
 in which, in the course of the last ten days, death 
 was unanimously voted to the chief pastor of that 
 Christian city. These are the fruits of the rejec- 
 tion of Christianity. Such, then, is the second 
 step in the revolt of the intellect — the revolt 
 which begins with the rejection of the Divine 
 authority of the Church of God, and then goes 
 on to reject evidences, next to reject doctrines, 
 and lastly to reject Christianity. 
 
 3. The third kind of intellectual revolt, and it is 
 +he last ot which I will speak, in respect to those 
 who are without, is a form of false philosophy, 
 which in the Syllabus is described as * moderate' 
 Rationalism, as compared with that of which we 
 have been hitherto speaking, which is there called 
 ' absolute' Rationalism. Now the moderate Ration- 
 alism consists in this : in the retaining a belief of 
 Christianity, or the professing to believe it ; but 
 the believing of it only so much as, upon private 
 cHicism and its own judgment, the individual 
 
AGAINST GOD. 21 
 
 mind is disposed to retain. But is it not obvious 
 at once that the human reason can only stand 
 related to the revelation of God, either as a 
 critic, or as a disciple in the presence of a Divine 
 Teacher ? The moment the human reason begins 
 to criticise, to test, to examine, to retain, or 
 to reject, it has ceased to be a disciple ; it has 
 become the critic ; it has ceased to be the learner, 
 it has become the judge; and yet find me, if 
 you can, any middle point vs^here the reason of 
 man can stand between the two extremes of sub- 
 mitting to the Divine authority of faith as a disci- 
 ple, and of criticising the whole revelation of God 
 as a judge. There is nothing between the two. 
 Now this kind of intellectual revolt (I must call it 
 by a hard name, but it is an old one, and used by 
 the Apostles) is heresy. What is the meaning of 
 heresy ? It means the choosing for ourselves, as 
 contra^distinguished from the receiving with docil- 
 ity from the lips of a teacher — the choosing for our- 
 selves what we will believe and how much we will 
 believe. St. James says, 'Whosoever shall keep 
 the whole law, but offend in one point, is become 
 guilty of all ;'* and that, for this reason : He that 
 
 ' St. James ii. 10. 
 
22 THE REVOLT OF THE INTELLECT 
 
 said, Thou shalt not kill, said also. Thou shalt not 
 steal ; but if I steal my neighbour's goods with- 
 out taking his life, I violate the Divine authority 
 which runs through both the commandments. In 
 the same way, he who shall believe all the articles 
 of faith, and yet reject one of them, in that re- 
 jection rejects the whole Divine authority upon 
 Avhich all the articles of faith alike depend. This 
 spirit of criticism begins, as I said before, in the 
 rejection of the principle of Divine authority and 
 the adoption of private judgment, which is essen- 
 tially, though at first covertly, a violation of that 
 Divine authority. The human reason thereby un- 
 consciously assumes to itself to be the test and 
 the measure of that which is to be believed. For 
 instance; in interpreting Holy Scripture, if I inter- 
 pret the Book according to the light of my in- 
 dividual judgment, the interpretation that I attach 
 to it is my own. The text may be Divine, but the 
 interpretation is human. And this must be, where- 
 soever the Divine authority of the Church is not 
 recognised as a principle of faith. You know how 
 the rejection of this Divine authority has shattered 
 the iTiiity of faith in England. I say this, as I said 
 before, with sorrow. I do not charge all those who 
 
AGAINST GOD. 23 
 
 are out of the unity of the CathoHc faith with heresy. 
 The EngHsh people are indeed in heresy, but I do 
 not call them heretics. God forbid ! They were born 
 into that state of privation. They found themselves 
 disinherited. They have never known their right- 
 ful inheritance. They have grown up, believing 
 what has been set before them by parents and 
 by teachers; their state of privation has been 
 caused by the sin of others three hundred years 
 ago, and by no act of rejection of their own. The 
 millions of our people, the children, the unlearned, 
 the simple, the docile, the humble, the wives and 
 mothers and daughters, the great multitude who 
 live lives of prayer and of charity and of mutual 
 kindness, who never had the opportunity of know- 
 ing the truth — to call them heretics would be to 
 wound charity. They have never made a per- 
 verse election against the truth; and I heartily 
 believe that millions of them, if the light of the 
 Catholic Church were sufficiently before them, 
 would, as multitudes have done in every age, for- 
 sake all things to take up their cross and follow 
 their Master. 
 
 4. I must now make application of what I have 
 said, more nearly to ourselves. What I am going 
 
24 THE REVOLT OF THE INTELLECT 
 
 to add, I address most especially to those wlio 
 are of my flock. 
 
 We live in a country whicli for three hundred 
 years has been pervaded by a spirit of opposition 
 to the Catholic Church. Everything round about 
 us is full of antagonism to the Faith. The whole 
 literature of this country is written by those who, 
 sometimes unconsciously, sometimes consciously, 
 assume an attitude of hostility to it. I say, some- 
 times unconsciously, because, being born in that 
 state, they often do so without being aware that 
 they have received an heirloom of false prin- 
 ciples and of false histories respecting the Holy Ca- 
 tholic Church. Without knowing it, they are 
 perpetually incorporating them with what they 
 write ; so that the greater part of the literature of 
 this country, which is in the hands of us all, con- 
 tains a systematic contradiction of that which we 
 believe. The newspapers, which fill the whole 
 country, day by day are animated by a spirit 
 which is against us; and they are filled by details, 
 and narratives, and correspondence, and they 
 must forgive me if I say, fables, fictions, fabri- 
 cations, absurdities — anything that can pander to 
 the morbid appetite, to the craving for scandals 
 
AGAINST GOD. 25 
 
 against Catholic institutions, Catholic priests, Ca- 
 tholic nuns. Only the other day we read attacks 
 against certain nuns in Paris which, for studied 
 but transparent falsehood, were worthy of the 
 Commission of Henry VIII. How is it possible 
 that Catholics can read these things day by day, 
 and their eyes, and imaginations, and hearts re- 
 ceive insensibly no stain from them ? They who 
 walk in the sun cannot help being tanned. You 
 go to and fro in the midst of all this literature 
 and all these daily calumnies, you breathe this 
 atmosphere charged with untruths — how is it pos- 
 sible that you should be unaffected by them? 
 Do we not frequently hear Catholics say : ' Am I 
 to believe this f ' Can I contradict it f ' If it be 
 not contradicted, there must be some truth in it.' 
 Little by little it gets iato the minds of men with, 
 * I suppose, then, it cannot be denied ;' ' Where 
 there is smoke there is fire.' In this way, false- 
 hoods are insinuated. They are either never 
 contradicted, or the contradiction is never pub- 
 lished, or if published, hardly seen. The slan- 
 der has done its work, and the stain remains. 
 We live where Catholics are few, where those 
 who are not Catholics are the great multitude; 
 
26 THE REVOLT OF THE INTELLECT 
 
 we are bound up with them in kindred, in affinity, 
 in friendship, in business, in duty, in society. It 
 is impossible that we should not live amongst 
 them, work with them, and have friendships with, 
 them. Charity obliges us to converse with them, 
 and we hear much that certainly does not tend 
 to confirm the faith. There was growing up in 
 the minds of some men a disposition, which, I am 
 happy to say, is nearly cast out again, to diminish 
 and to explain away, to understate and reduce to 
 a minimum that which Catholics ought to believe 
 and to practise. This spirit began in Germany. 
 It says : ' I believe everything which the Church 
 has defined. I believe all dogmas ; everything 
 which has been defined by a General Council.' 
 This sounds a large and generous profession of 
 faith ; but they forget that whatsoever was re- 
 vealed on the day of Pentecost to the Apostles, 
 and by the Apostles preached to the nations of 
 the world, and has descended in the full stream 
 of universal belief and constant tradition, though 
 it has never been defined, is still matter of Divine 
 faith. Thus there are truths of faith which have 
 never been defined; and they have never been 
 defined because they have never been contradicted. 
 
AGAINST GOD. 27 
 
 They are not defined because they have not been 
 denied. The definition of the truth is the fortifi- 
 cation of the Church against the assaults of un- 
 belief. Some of the greatest truths of revelation 
 are to this day undefined. The infallibility of the 
 Church has never been defined. The infallibility 
 of the Head of the Church was only defined the 
 other day. But the infallibility of the Church, for 
 which every Catholic would lay down his life, has 
 never been defined until now ; the infallibility of 
 the Church is at this moment where the infalli- 
 bility of the Pope was this time last year : an un- 
 defined point of Christian revelation, believed by 
 the Christian world, but not yet put in the form 
 of a definition. When, therefore, men said they 
 would only believe dogmas, and definitions by 
 General Councils, they implied, without knowing 
 it, that they would not believe in the infallibility 
 of the Church. But the whole tradition of Christi- 
 anity comes down to us on the universal testimony 
 and the infallibility of the Church of God ; which, 
 whether defined or not, is a matter otD'ivme taith. 
 I will make application of what i have said \vheu 
 I sum up the argument I am stating. iNext, 
 people began to say : ' I can admit that the Head 
 
28 THE REVOLT OF THE INTELLECT 
 
 of the Church has a supreme authority, but that 
 authority is not without its limits, and the limits 
 are here and there.' Now who, I ask, can limit 
 the jurisdiction of a supreme authority? Who can 
 prescribe the limits of any jurisdiction but one 
 who in authority is superior to him who holds the 
 jurisdiction I This spirit of insubordination was 
 coming in amongst us ; it has no existence now, 
 because the Council of last year struck it dead. 
 I should have thought that a generous heart, filled 
 with the love of God, would have desired to know 
 more and more of Divine truth, and would have 
 said, 'Let me know everything which God has 
 revealed, let me have the fullest and the amplest 
 knowledge,' rather than be jealous and niggardly 
 in limiting the growth of that knowledge. 
 
 5. Lastly, and this is the only other point I will 
 at present touch on, the effect of such an atmo- 
 sphere as that we live in, breathing all the day 
 long the cold air of a country which for three 
 hundred years has been opposed to the Holy 
 Catholic Faith, is to produce that which must be 
 called practical unbelief, even in many who would 
 lay down their lives for the dogmas of the Faith. 
 And that pj-actical unbelief is this : their faith re- 
 
AGAINST GOD. 29 
 
 sides in their intellect whole and perfect, but it is 
 cold and unenergetic in their life, and it does not 
 govern and mould the character and the "will. 
 They get acclimatised to the temperature round 
 about them. You all know how we become ac- 
 climatised to a foreign country, how we can learn 
 the habits and the language and the accent of a 
 foreign people. Such is the state of many who 
 intellectually retain their faith, but practically 
 seem not to believe. They become, for instance, 
 unconscious of the Communion of Saints, of the 
 presence of God, of the operation of the unseen 
 world, of the working of the Holy Spirit of God 
 in the Church, and of the personal agency and 
 subtlety of the enemy of truth. I have given 
 these last two examples, because they are the 
 two stealthy and secret approaches whereby the 
 enemy of truth first assails those who sincerely 
 believe. When opening his trenches against the 
 faith of those who never doubted, he begins with 
 the least noise, and under cover. 
 
 I will now sum up what I have said. The re- 
 volt of the intellect against God is agair.st His 
 existence, or against His revelation, or against 
 His Divine authority. And there are tb^ i*^wo 
 
30 THE REVOLT OP THE INTELLECT 
 
 Stealthy and incipient forms of intellectual revolt 
 to which Catholics are tempted; the one of dimia- 
 ishing what they believe to a minimum, the other 
 in reducing to the least that which they are bound 
 to submit to in point of authority, or to practise 
 in point of devotion, 
 
 I can make but one application of what has 
 been said. Two years ago, when the CEcumenical 
 Council was summoned to meet in Rome, immedi- 
 ately through all European countries, both those 
 which are within the unity of the Church and 
 those which are separated from it, there arose a 
 conspiracy against the Council. Men of the cha- 
 racter I have been describing, with those called 
 ' liberal Catholics,' and, strange to say, Christians 
 of all sects, and Israelites not a few, revolutionists, 
 rationalists, chiefly out of the Church, but some 
 within it, professors, declaimers, secret political so- 
 cieties, discontented and fractious minds already 
 out of harmony with authority and the Church 
 in all parts of Europe, combined against the Vatican 
 Council. This general conspiracy strove, by cor- 
 respondence, and by articles, pamphlets, and news- 
 papero, to avert one thing, which all alike instinc- 
 tively telt to be fatal to their pretensions. They 
 
AGAINST GOU. 31 
 
 all alike feared lest tlie infallible authority of the 
 Head of the Church should be defined as a doc- 
 trine of faith. An unerring instinct taught them 
 that such a definition would require of critics the 
 submission of disciples. They were perfectly right ; 
 so perfectly right, indeed, that those who deshed 
 to see this definition made, desired it for the same 
 explicit reason for which others opposed it. It 
 was well known on either side that we were con- 
 tending for the Divine authority of faith — the 
 world against it, the Church for it — and that the 
 axe was laid to the root of the tree. The conflict 
 was not for this doctrine or that doctrine, nor for a 
 fragment in detail, but for the Divine certainty of 
 the whole. Well, that opposition was encouraged, 
 flattered, countenanced by the favour of govern- 
 ments and diplomatists, statesmen and philoso- 
 phers. All the newspaper press and the whole 
 public opinion of the world was united against 
 the Vatican Council. It tried to write it down, to 
 make it ridiculous, to hold it up to contempt; 
 men staked their literary credit and their autho- 
 rity over men upon the issue of the effort to tnm 
 the Vatican Council aside from its purpose, and. 
 to hinder it from doing its work. I am not svv- 
 
32 THE REVOLT OF THE INTELLECT 
 
 prised that no little disappointment should be in 
 the minds of those who so conspired. I am not 
 the least surprised at their saying and writing 
 sharp and bitter things against us ; for a more 
 complete overthrow of a very powerful conspiracy 
 was never seen. Well, that being over, we next 
 heard that after publication of the definition, in 
 every Catholic country, I know not how many 
 bishops, how many priests, how many professors, 
 how many learned men, how many of the Catholic 
 laity, were to rise up to begin a new reformation. 
 We held our peace ; we knew better. The time 
 was not come. Words do little ; events do every- 
 thing. We waited. What is the result 1 Every 
 bishop of the Church of God acknowledges the 
 authority of that (Ecumenical Council. If there 
 be here and there a priest who does not acknow- 
 ledge its authority, they may be counted on your 
 fingers. I do indeed hear of a professor here and 
 there ; but it is not all learned men that are pro- 
 fessors, and it is not all professors that are learned 
 men. Among the bishops and among the priests 
 01 the Church there are many profound theolo- 
 f^ans who have never sat in a professor's chair. 
 It IS not the habit that makes the monk, nor is it 
 
AGAINST GOD, 33 
 
 the title of professor that makes the learned man ; 
 and many that have never sat in the chair of a 
 professor are' more profoundly learned than many 
 who have ; and there are many sitting in those 
 chairs v/iio, to speak with profuse respect, are not 
 learned. If, therefore, I find that in Germany 
 some professors have been making declarations 
 against the Council, that does not surprise, still 
 less alarm, me. It is against this same rational- 
 istic spirit — that is, the pretensions of perverted 
 intellect — that the whole pontificate of Pius IX. 
 has contended. And it was perfectly foreseen, 
 that the moment this intellectual Gnosticism was 
 touched, it would rise ; and the risiug has been 
 incomparably less than was expected. 
 
 There never was a General Council of the 
 Church after which there followed less of contra- 
 diction. After the great Council of Nice, Arianism, 
 became a formal heresy which afflicted the Church 
 for centuries. After the Council of Ephesus, Nes- 
 torianism became a formal heresy which is not 
 extinct at this day. After the Council of Con 
 stance, the spirit of national insubordination sowed 
 the seeds of Gallicanism, which was only extin- 
 guished last year in the Vatican Coimcil. After 
 
 D 
 
34 THE REVOLT OF THE INTELLECT 
 
 the Council of the Vatican, or at least its first 
 sessions, it is no surprise that a handful of pro- 
 fessors in Germany should rise up against it ; and 
 when I analyse the list and find out who these 
 professors really are, I am still farther from sur- 
 prise. There are, I believe, only two professors of 
 theology ; but we find professors of botany, miner- 
 alogy, chemistry, anatomy, physic, and of I know 
 not what. The other day we saw an address 
 from the University of Rome to an aged and cele- 
 brated professor at Munich. Well, there came an 
 address from the University of Rome ; and there 
 went up a cry of exultation in England, that even 
 within sight of the windows of the Vatican, Rome 
 had protested against the Vatican Council. I 
 have to-day read the names of the men who 
 signed that address : and I find that they were, 
 with hardly an exception, men intruded by the 
 Italian Government since last September, and 
 that they style themselves professors of botany, 
 of mineralogy, of chemistry, of surgery, and one 
 desci-ibes himself as professor of Veterinary Pa- 
 thology. 
 
 Before the Council met, a great preacher in 
 France, whose natural gifts tad filled the land 
 
AGAINST GOD. 35 
 
 with his fame, in an evil hour lifted up the elo- 
 quent voice which Grod had given him, against 
 the Vicar of Jesus Christ. Where is he now'? 
 Lost, powerless, unknown. 
 
 The venerable professor in Germany — more 
 learned, indeed, in history sacred and profane, 
 than either in Christian philosophy or in the- 
 ology, the founder of a school and the master of 
 many disciples— through the whole of the Council 
 exercised his influence with a skill and a boldness 
 which would have made itself sensibly felt against 
 any authority which was not Divine. We looked 
 forward with anxiety to what might be his future 
 career. 1 was fully prepared to hear that which 
 I have heard ; and I feared too that his eminent 
 example might have led astray a multitude of his 
 disciples. What do I see ? Not a bishop, though 
 many were his disciples. A few priests, and a 
 handful of professors ; and this is all that comes 
 after the Council of the Vatican. A little momen- 
 tary agitation, a little transient noise, and a pass- 
 ing sorrow. The Council has extinguished the 
 last remaining divergence of thought in respect 
 to faith, to be found among Catholics. It has com- 
 pacted and consolidated the Divine authority of 
 
36 EEVOLT OF THE IXTELLECT AGAINST GOD. 
 
 the Clmrch in its head, and therefore in the whole 
 body, both in the active and passive infallibility. 
 The authority of the Vatican Council is fatal to the 
 jemi-rationalism which had crept within the Church. 
 The antagonists knew it well, and the Council 
 knew it likewise when it made that definition. 
 There never was a time when the faith of the 
 Catholic Chm-ch was more firm, complete, and 
 universal than at this time. And if in the course 
 of ages a revolt of the intellect has carried away 
 individuals from the Faith, in the course of the 
 same ages, the manifestations of the Divine au- 
 thority of the Chm-ch in the midst of mankind 
 have been made more luminous and self-evident 
 than ever. 
 
LECTURE II. 
 
 THE REVOLT OF THE WILL AGAINST GOD. 
 
 ' The wisdom of the flesh is an enemy to God; for it is 
 not subject to the law of God, neither can it be. 
 Eomans viii. 7. 
 
 On looking back at what I have hitherto said, I 
 feel niore than ever the difficulty under which I 
 have been, in laying before you a subject which, 
 if it had been treated in detail, with the exactness 
 which a philosophical or a theological argument 
 would require, must have become entirely impos- 
 sible in such a popular form. But the treating 
 it in a popular form may perhaps lay my state- 
 ment open to question and to cavil. Between 
 these two difficulties I can only attempt to give 
 a correct outline. I will therefore remind you 
 briefly of what I have said. 
 
38 THE REVOLT OF THE WHX 
 
 I have spoken of the revolt of the intellect 
 from God as one of the chief evils of these latter 
 times; and I instanced in proof of it the rise 
 of Atheism — a negation of the existence of God — 
 which I then said, and say again, is characteristic 
 of these latter days ; because the earlier ages of 
 the world were so profusely penetrated vsdth the 
 traditionary belief in a Divine being, that, though 
 they fell into Polytheism, Pantheism, and idolatry, 
 yet into Atheism, as we know it now, they never 
 fell. The other intellectual evUs of these times 
 are Deism, or the rejection of revelation ; heresy, 
 or the rejection of the Divine voice of the Church, 
 the jealous and ungenerous limitation of the doc- 
 trinal authority of the Church, even in those who 
 believe in the revelation of the Faith; and lastly, 
 the practical unbelief of lukewarm and heartless 
 Catholics. These two last being what may be 
 called the premonitory symptoms of rationalistic 
 doubt and of final unbelief. 
 
 The next subject before us is the revolt of the 
 will of man from the authority of God. The con- 
 nection between the two subjects is evident. We 
 never will anything which we have not first 
 thought. There is an action of the intellect pre- 
 
AGAINST GOD. 39 
 
 ceding every act of the will ; for the will that 
 acts without the previous guidance of the intellect 
 is an irrational will. It may be the action of a 
 man, but it is not a human action, because it is 
 not under the guidance of reason. Therefore, 
 before every act of the will, there must be an 
 act of the intellect or reason. The connection 
 between the last and the present subject is this : 
 that if the reason or intellect be rightly directed 
 by the truth, which is the intelligence of God, the 
 will will be directed according to the law of God. 
 But if the intellect be perverted or obscured, then 
 the perversion or the obscurity will descend from 
 the intellect into the will, and the will will be 
 likewise perverted or enfeebled. Now the words 
 which I have taken from St. Paul's Epistle to the 
 Romans express this truth. He had already said : 
 ' There is now, therefore, no condemnation to them 
 that are in Christ Jesus, who walk not according 
 to the flesh,' but according to the Spirit. ' For the 
 law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath deliv- 
 ered me from the law of sin and death ; for what 
 the law could not do, in that it was weak through 
 the flesh, God sending His own Son in the likeness 
 of sinful flesh and of sin, hath condemned sin in 
 
40 THE REVOLT OF THE WILL 
 
 the flesh ; that the justification of the law might 
 be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the 
 flesh, but according to the Spirit. For they that 
 are according to the flesh, mind the things that 
 are of the flesh ; but they that are according to the 
 Spirit, mind the things that are of the Spirit. For 
 the wisdom of the flesh is death: but the wisdom 
 of the Spirit is life and peace. Because the wis- 
 dom of the flesh is an enemy to God ; for it is not 
 subject to the law of God, neither can it be. And 
 they who are in the flesh cannot please God.'"- 
 Now the word ' flesh' here means simply mankind, 
 human nature, man as he is without God, man as 
 he is, with the affections, the passions, the intel- 
 lect, the will, and the three wounds which came 
 by the fall; that is, ignorance in the intellect, 
 disorder in the passions, and weakness in the will. 
 This is what the Apostle calls the ' flesh.' Now, 
 he says the wisdom of the flesh ; and in the Latin 
 version in one place it is translated ' the prudence 
 of the flesh;' in another, ' the wisdom of the flesh;' 
 and in the original Greek it is the ' mind ;' that is 
 to say, the aggregate of aff"ections, passions, and 
 thoughts acting upon the will, disturbing and per- 
 ' Eom. yiii. 1-8. 
 
AGAINST GOD. 41 
 
 verting it. Human nature in its fallen state is 
 declared to be an enemy of God, not subject to 
 the law of God. St. Paul says that it cannot be 
 subject to the law of God, for this reason: so long 
 as it is in that state of disorder, it must be intrin- 
 sically opposed to the will of God ; for it is un- 
 holy, and God is holy ; it is false, and God is true ; 
 it is unjust, and God is just ; and therefore, like as 
 a crooked line cannot be a straight line— and if 
 the line can be straightened, its crookedness has 
 ceased to exist, for crookedness can never be 
 straight — so it is with human nature, unless it is 
 changed, renewed, and elevated. Tn renewal it 
 puts offits former disorder, which cannot be subject 
 to the law of God. The disorder ceases to exist. 
 Now, such was not the state of man when God 
 made him in the beginning. Man was created 
 perfect, both in body and soul. The passions and 
 aifections were in perfect subjection to his will, 
 and his will to the will of God. From the first 
 moment of his creation he was constituted in a 
 state of grace, and the Spirit of God dwelt in him, 
 illuminating him with the knowledge of God, 
 ordering his affections and passions according to 
 the law of God, and subjecting his will to the will 
 
42 THE REVOLT OF THE WHjL 
 
 of God ; SO that there was a supernatural unity 
 and harmony in his soul, and his soul was, as it 
 were, the Kingdom of God within him. Such was 
 the state of man in the beginning; and the wis- 
 dom of the ilesh then had no existence — the wis- 
 dom of the Spirit reigned in him, which is both life 
 and peace. When sin entered, and death by sin, 
 then the wisdom of the flesh developed itself; that 
 is, hviman nature in its fallen state, deprived by its 
 own sin of the Spirit of God, became darkened, 
 troubled, disordered, unholy. The unity and har- 
 mony which existed before, the dominion of the 
 soul over itself, was shattered and destroyed. 
 The rebellion of the passions and affections 
 against the soul at once arose. As soon as the 
 will of man revolted against the will of God, 
 the passions and affections in him, which till then 
 had been subject to him, revolted. He was pun- 
 ished for his revolt against God by an internal 
 revolt against himself. 
 
 Now this rebellion of' the soul is healed by 
 the redemption of the Precious Blood of Jesus 
 Christ. In the regeneration of the soul by the 
 Sacrament of holy Baptism, the Spirit of God is 
 once more communicated to the nature of man. 
 
AGAINST GOD. 43 
 
 God makes the soul His dwelling-place; the 
 order and harmony of the soul begins to be 
 renewed in Him. The wisdom of the Spirit is 
 the mind of one who, being under the guid- 
 ance and government of the Spirit of God, has 
 subjected his intellect to the truth of God, and 
 his will to the will of God. He is therefore in 
 friendship with Him. St. John and St. James both 
 say that the friendship of this world is enmity 
 against God, because there is an essential enmity 
 between the state of fallen man and God. But 
 when, by regeneration, the will of man is re- 
 stored to union with God, friendship with God 
 is restored to man. This, then, is the meaning 
 of the Apostle's words. Now, let us make appli- 
 cation of them. A rock of crystal resolves itself into 
 a multitude of crystals, every one of which bears 
 the type of the whole. The primitive form per- 
 vades the whole block. In like manner, every 
 regenerate soul restored to friendship and union 
 with God, by the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, is 
 compacted in the Body of Christ : ' unto whom 
 coming,' as St. Peter says, ' be you also as living 
 stones built up, a spiritual house.'^ And as every 
 » 1 St. Peter u. 4, 5. 
 
44 THE REVOLT OF THE ■V^^LL 
 
 stone is shaped and squared and fashioned 
 and fitted to the place that it is to occupy, so 
 every Christian soul, built up into the unity of the 
 Church of Jesus 'Christ, grows into a temple in 
 which God dwells by His Spirit. In this kingdom 
 the will of God is supreme, and the Holy Spirit 
 perpetually dwells, pervading the Church with 
 sanctity. The Church incorporates the will of 
 God, and makes it visible among men. The sins 
 of individuals notwithstanding, the Church is con- 
 formed by its interior subjection to the will of 
 God, because it is a spiritual society made up of 
 individuals, called from all races and languages, 
 compacted and built together in indissoluble unity, 
 as they subject themselves, one by one, to the 
 Avisdom of the Spirit, Who dwells in the Church 
 for ever. But the Church has a twofold mission. 
 The first part of its work — the highest and the 
 noblest — is the salvation of individual souls, as I 
 have described. But it has another : the second 
 part of the mission of the Church to the world is 
 the sanctification of the civil society of the world, 
 that is, of the households and families of men; then 
 of peoples, nations, states, legislatures, kingdoms, 
 empires, and the whole civil order of mankind. 
 
AGAINST GOD. 45 
 
 The Chui-cli has had three periods. The first 
 was the period of three hundred years, while it 
 was accomplishing its spmtual mission for the con- 
 version and salvation of individuals, under perse- 
 cution. The second period began with the cessation 
 of persecution in the conversion of the first em- 
 peror, by whom, it may be said, the civil power of 
 the world first paid homage to the Church of God. 
 From that date down to the sixteenth century, 
 the civil society of the world was pervaded by 
 the Christian law, by Christian faith, by Christian 
 unity, by Christian worship. The laws of God 
 became the laws of Christian nations ; the laws of 
 the Church were transcribed into the statutes of 
 Christian people ; and the civil and spiritual au- 
 thorities of the world were united together in 
 peace and harmony. There never was a period 
 in history when the world, as such, was so con- 
 formed to the will of God as in that period, from 
 the cessation of the last persecution until the six- 
 teenth century. Do not misunderstand me to say 
 that the world had the note of sanctity. No ; sanc- 
 tity is the note of the Church alone. But even the 
 world then acknowledged God and His revelation, 
 the unity of His worship, the unity of His Church, 
 
46 THE REVOLT OP THE WILL 
 
 the supreme authority of faith, and of its laws. 
 Even the world — the kingdoms and empires of 
 the world — acknowledged these things ; and that 
 was a time when, howsoever the passions and 
 affections of man rebelled, yet the public order of 
 society was Christian, and the wisdom of the flesh 
 was, at least so far as public laws could reach, in 
 subjection to the wisdom of the Spirit. I know 
 that the history of those times is full of outrages, 
 horrors, violence, and the worst of crimes ; never- 
 theless, I reaffirm what I have said, that in those 
 ages the world was Christian and society was 
 Christian. We have now entered into the third 
 period of the history of the Church. From the six- 
 teenth century downwards to the present time 
 there has been an undoing of that work which the 
 Church, for the previous fourteen hundred years, 
 had been accomplishing; there has been a pulling 
 down of the whole fabric ; a disintegration of the 
 Christian society; an erasing of Christian laws 
 from the statute-books of nations ; a breaking-up 
 of the unity of faith, worship, and communion ; a 
 rejection of the spii-itual authority of the Church 
 over men. I am not now entering into any ex- 
 amination of this, which will fall more naturally 
 
AGAINST GOD. 47 
 
 under oui- next subject; but I am compelled in 
 outline to state it, in order to bring out the sub- 
 ject whicli is now before us. 
 
 I would ask, then, what is it that has been 
 going on for the last three hundred years'? A 
 revolt of the will of man from the will of God, as 
 expressed and embodied in the whole work of the 
 Church for the previous fourteen hundred years. 
 When, three hundred years ago, individuals one 
 by one revolted from the authority of the Church, 
 they laid the first seeds of the revolutions which, 
 in these later ages, have separated whole nations 
 from the unity of the Faith. Individuals began 
 the work in the sphere of private judgment, or 
 of their private conscience before God. But that 
 which begins in the private conscience of men 
 one by one, becomes little by little the collective 
 and public opinion of a people, and is at last forced 
 upon governments and legislatures, and changes 
 the public laws in conformity to itself. Now, 
 for the last three hundred years, there has been a 
 continual expunging of the law of Christianity, of 
 the faith and the doctrines of Christianity, from 
 the laws of Christian peoples ; so that I may say 
 that at this moment there does not remain one 
 
48 THE REVOLT OP THE WILL 
 
 single people that has not separated itself for- 
 mally from its old relations ofunity with the Chris- 
 tian Church. Many, as in the north and west of 
 Europe, have formally separated themselves alto- 
 gether from the unity of the Catholic Church. 
 Other nations, that remain at least united in faith 
 and in outward worship, nevertheless have broken 
 all bonds and relations with it, except in the bare 
 retaining of dogma and of spiritual discipline. 
 And now this revolt against the will of God, as 
 expressed and embodied by His providence in the 
 work of the fourteen centuries preceding, has re- 
 ceived its momentary completion. The people 
 most favoured among Christian nations, as having 
 in the midst of them the throne of the Vicar of 
 Jesus Christ, have revolted, and with a sacrilegious 
 and violent invasion have usurped the city of 
 Rome which, from the beginning of Christianity, 
 has been the centre and the head of the Christian 
 Church, and, ever since persecution ceased, has 
 been the visible throne from which the Vicars of 
 Christ have reigned, by faith and the Divine law, 
 over the nations of the world. 
 
 1. The first mark, then, of these times is lawless- 
 ness. This revolt of the will from God is signally 
 
AGAINST GOD. 49 
 
 manifested in the rejection of that order of Chris- 
 tian civilisation which the Divine providence has 
 built up in the vphole past history of Christendom. 
 St. Paul, in his Epistle to Timothy, says : ' In the 
 last days, shall come on dangerous times. Men 
 shall be lovers of themselves, covetous, haughty, 
 proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, un- 
 grateful, wicked, incontinent, traitors, stubborn, 
 puffed-up, and lovers of pleasures more than of 
 God.'* ' Evil men and seducers shall grow worse 
 and worse, erring,'* and driving the world into 
 error. Now these words are a prophecy of the 
 latter times of the world ; and if these be not the 
 latter times, they have at least the marks already 
 upon them. St. Paul also, writing to the Thessa- 
 lonians, and speaking again of the latter times, 
 says that ' the man of sin,' ' that wicked one, shall 
 be revealed.'^ Now, I shall not enter into the ques- 
 tion of who that wicked one may be ; but we can 
 distinctly understand why St. Paul calls him that 
 wicked one. The word in the original is, 'that 
 lawless' one, that is, one who will not recog- 
 nise any law but his own will, who will pull 
 down and destroy the work of God. Now, if 
 ' 2 Tim. iii. 1-4. • Ibid. 13. » 2 Thess. ii. 3, 8. 
 
50 THE REVOLT OP THE 'WTLL 
 
 there be any one thing which is a more powerful 
 solvent of the Christian world than another, it is 
 lawlessness, the rejection of law, the rebellion of 
 the human will, the human will making a law to 
 itself, that is, each individual becoming his own, 
 legislator, and each legislator making laws at va- 
 riance with the wills of others, causing perpetual 
 change, universal discord, isolation of man from 
 man, and because isolation, therefore conflict end- 
 lees and suicidal. 
 
 Now, we hear, day by day, the glorification 
 of revolutions. And what are revolutions'? They 
 are the violent disintegration of that order which 
 is based upon authority and obedience ; or, in 
 other words, they are the extinction of the idea 
 of law and of obligation, the overthrow of the su- 
 premacy of law, of the duties of the human con- 
 science and of the human will to law : first to the 
 law of God, for that is the sole foundation and 
 basis of all authority, and then to the civil and 
 political laws of society, which spring from that 
 Divine law and are sanctioned by it. The first 
 and broadest mark that is upon these days, then, 
 is lawlessness. 
 
 I should be anticipating what I have to say 
 
AGAINST GOD. 51 
 
 hereafter if I were to take for example any parti- 
 cular people or any particular nation ; but I think 
 no man that has read, be it ever so little, of the 
 modern books upon what is called ' democracy,' of 
 its gradual and steady advance, its perpetual and 
 irresistible development, in countries separated 
 indeed from us by a wide sea, but closely allied 
 to us by all that acts and reacts upon peoples of 
 the same origin, will misunderstand my meaning. 
 This lawlessness shows itself ia these three ways : 
 First, in individuals ; that is to say, men 
 have ceased to govern their conduct with refer- 
 ence to the laws of God and His Church. Many 
 have so completely ceased to do this, that any one 
 who does so is marked as fanatical or bigoted 
 or a believer. We have come to the days when 
 in some countries the man who professes faith is 
 marked for reproach as a clerical, or soft-headed, 
 or a reactionist. Even in our own country this is 
 true. You may not meet it, perhaps, in the so- 
 ciety in which you live ; a certain refinement re- 
 presses it. But there are classes more outspoken, 
 where the truth is told more baldly. Fifty years 
 ago, if a man did not believe in Christianity he 
 held his peace, not only out of respect for others, 
 
52 THE REVOLT OP THE WILL 
 
 but out of respect for himself. Now, men have no 
 shame to profess infidelity. Then, the masses 
 professed to be what their fathers were. Now, 
 when, out of some hundreds of working men, 
 one was known to go to church, his companions 
 gave him a nickname, and that name was the 
 most sacred Name that was ever heard on eai'th. 
 The laws of that Divine Person cannot be vivid 
 in the minds of those who could so disclaim their 
 share in Him. 
 
 There is, further, a deliberate and legal depar- 
 ture from the Divine law which lies at the very- 
 foundation of social life. Christian matrimony is 
 a Sacrament, and creates an indissoluble bond 
 which death alone can loose. Such was the law 
 of England, not only till three hundred years ago, 
 but imtil fifteen years ago, though by Acts of 
 Parliament it was violated ; that is, by privileges, 
 or private laws for private cases, persons were 
 protected from the penalties of the law. The law 
 of Christendom was the law of England down to 
 fifteen years ago, and the bond of marriage was 
 indissoluble. But the indissoluble bond of mar- 
 riage is the foundation of the domestic life of 
 Christendom. It was out of that principle of au- 
 
AGAINST GOD. 53 
 
 thority aud order that Chvistendom arose in its 
 unity and purity, in the midst of the unimaginable 
 evils of the heathen world. And in these days a 
 blow has been struck at this first principle of 
 Christian homes, which are the foundation of 
 political society. 
 
 Moreover, in the whole civil and political order 
 there has risen up in the last century a formal 
 rebellion against authority. About eighty years 
 ago was published to the world a new gospel for 
 the political order of men. It has been called ' the 
 Principles of '89.' Read it for yourselves, and you 
 will find it full of what is called ' the rights of 
 man.' But there are two things of which you will 
 fiudnothing. First, you will find nothing there about 
 the rights of God ; and surely they ought to have- 
 precedence ; and, secondly, you will find nothing 
 there about the duties of man; but surely men 
 have duties. When men rise for their rights, for- 
 getting to say a word about their duties, they are 
 already in rebellion. But again I am anticipat- 
 ing what belongs to our next subject. I cannot, 
 however, fail to notice, in order to make this point 
 clear, that we now are hearing of the rights of 
 women ; and if there can be a sign of a society 
 
54 THE REVOLT OP THE WILL 
 
 inverted, and of the moral order of the world re- 
 versed, it is the putting of woman out of her proper 
 sphere — -the domestic life — where she is sove- 
 reign, and the putting her in that sphere where 
 she ought never to set her foot — the public life 
 of nations. To put man and woman upon an 
 equality is not to elevate woman, but to degrade 
 her. I trust that the womanhood of England — to 
 say nothing of the Christian conscience which 
 yet remains — will resist, by a stern moral re- 
 fusal, the immodesty which would thrust women 
 from their private life of dignity and supremacy 
 into the public conflicts of men. This, again, is 
 a part of the lawlessness of these days, and shows 
 a decline of the finer instincts of womanhood, and 
 a loss of that decisive Christian conscience which 
 can distinguish not only between what is right 
 and wrong, but between what is dignified and 
 what is undignified both for women and for men. 
 This clamour about women's rights may be taken 
 as one of the most subtle and most certain marks 
 of a lawlessness of mind which is now invading 
 society. This, then, is the first example I will 
 give of lawlessness in general. 
 
 2. And, secondly, this lawlessness is invading 
 
AGAINST GOD. 55 
 
 the domestic and private life of men in the form of 
 luxury; and perhaps there is no country which is in 
 greater danger from this cause than ours. We are 
 the wealthiest people in the world. The personal 
 and the national wealth of England is something 
 incomparable in the history of mankind. I must, 
 however, bear witness — and it is full of consolation 
 to know it — that there is still to be found a common 
 good sense, a firm resisting manliness, in the English 
 character — and it prevails also in the characters of 
 some of the women of England — a determination 
 not to be softened and pampered. Men refuse to 
 be made effeminate, and women to be self-indulg- 
 ent. There is, then, something to resist it ; and I 
 hope, for that reason, that the pestilence of luxury 
 may not prevail over us. But we are in danger lest 
 our superabundant wealth should create a material 
 civilisation, so advanced, so refined, and carried out 
 with such extraordinary subtlety of invention, that 
 it will need a very strong and firm will not to be 
 softened by it. There is no doubt that, in dress, in 
 pleasures, and in amusements, there is an invasion 
 of luxury in our higher society which is very dan- 
 gerous, and for this reason : when people have al- 
 lowed themselves to go up to the brink of all that 
 
56 THE REVOLT OF THE WILL 
 
 is lawful, it is very easy to trespass, and to go over 
 the line that is forbidden. The line between what 
 is lawful and unlawful in such minds is very faint 
 and shadowy; and those who are always walking 
 on the brink of the precipice, will not be long be- 
 fore they go over. The Apostle, speaking of wo- 
 men, says : ' She that liveth in pleasures, is dead 
 while she is living.'^ The taint of mortality is upon 
 a refined and luxurious life, though on the outside, 
 like the whited sepulchre, it seems unspotted. 
 There is no doubt that the precept of the Apostle 
 is very necessary in our day and in our country. 
 He says : ' All things are lawful to me, but all 
 things are not expedient.'' I know I have the 
 liberty ; I may do a multitude of things with per- 
 fect safety of conscience ; but I know this — that it 
 might be an example for others, which would be 
 dangerous to them, and it might also be a danger 
 to myself. At all events, it is more generous, it 
 is more in conformity with the example set me by 
 my Divine Lord and Master, to deny myself in 
 many things that are lawful. Apply this to dress, 
 to pleasures, to amusements, to the expenditure 
 you make on yourself, to your domestic and pri- 
 • 1 Tim. T. 6. '1 Cor. vi. 12. 
 
AGAINST GOD. 57 
 
 vate life, and jou will find a wide field for ita 
 application. 
 
 3. Once more. The lawlessness of our times is 
 to be found in our profuse worldliness. What is the 
 world but the aggregate of that wisdom of the 
 flesh, which is declared to be an enemy of God ? 
 The world always was and always will be at vari- 
 ance with the sanctity, the purity, the justice of 
 God; and therefore St. John says: 'Love not the 
 world, nor the things which are in the world. If 
 any man love the world, the charity of the Father 
 is not in him. For all that is in the world, is tlie 
 concupiscence of the flesh, and the concupiscence 
 of the eyes, and the pride of life, which is not 
 of the Father, but is of the world.'* And the 
 world is upon us all who live in it : its sun 
 shines upon us, we breathe its atmosphere, we 
 are in contact with it, we eat its food, we converse 
 with it all the day long, and happy are we if we 
 are not tainted by it. Now for the forms in which 
 the world presents itself to us. First, in its am- 
 bitions. You perhaps will think that ambition 
 belongs only to public life. There is ambition 
 everywhere, ambition in domestic life; in some 
 • 1 St. John ii. 15, 16. 
 
58 THE REVOLT OF THE WHjL 
 
 form or other, ambition in every one. The desire to 
 strain upward and to strain onward, to possess 
 more, to be more, to rise, to get into another 
 place, on another level, on another elevation, to 
 outstrip neighbours, to be more than they — what 
 is this but ambition 1 We recognise it and call 
 it by its name, when it is in great and noble ex- 
 amples, and we are ashamed of it when it has 
 manifested itself in the pettiness of oiir own pri- 
 vate life ; but it is ambition still. And this ambi- 
 tion of the world corrupts the hearts of multitudes, 
 because, where this ambition is, a multitude of 
 passions spring up round about it — envies, jeal- 
 ousies, rivalries, contentions, bickerings, rash judg- 
 ments, detraction of neighbours, depreciations, 
 running down those who are competing with us 
 and perhaps outstripping us. All this is the lawless- 
 ness of the heart. Its passions are not subject to 
 the law of God, neither, unless it be changed, can 
 be. These must be cast out as so many unclean 
 spirits, before the heart can be subject to the law 
 of God. Another form of worldliness cleaves to the 
 material interests of men ; such as rivalries in busi- 
 ness, in trade, in commerce, in the haste to get 
 rich, in the ravenous buying and selling and bar- 
 
AGAINST GOD. 59 
 
 gaining, in the market, on the stock-exchange, in 
 the bank, in the counting-house; overreaching of 
 neighbours, gambling speculations, enterprises of 
 doubtful integrity, in which the conscience is 
 strained and honour sacrificed ; hardness to those 
 who labour, xmdue profits made out of the flesh 
 and blood of those who are scantily paid for toil, 
 and then, it may be, fraudulent actions with public 
 ruin, and all coming from what caiise 1 From the 
 love of money — from that of which the Holy 
 Ghost thus speaks : ' The desire of money is the 
 root of all evils ; which some coveting after have 
 erred from the faith, and have entangled them- 
 selves in many sorrows.'' Such is the end of law- 
 lessness — the passions, not under the government 
 of holy fear and of justice, tempted all day long 
 by the spirit of gain, in the hope of laying up and 
 of being rich in this world ; forgetting the warning : 
 ' They that will become rich, fall into temptation, 
 and into the snare of the devil, and into many 
 unprofitable and hurtful desires, which drown men 
 into destruction and perdition.'^" Now, is there 
 any country in the world — except, it may be, a 
 country which has sprung from our own lineage — 
 » 1 Tim. Ti. 10. >» Ibid. 9. 
 
GO THE REVOLT OF THE WILL 
 
 in which what I have been describing is to be 
 found more dominant and more ruinous than in 
 our own? 
 
 And there is still another form of worldliness, 
 which also is a form of lawlessness ; that is, the 
 concealing of the law of God and the taking of 
 the laws of the world instead ; or, in other words, 
 the fear and worship of the world. The flattery, the 
 adulation, the sycophancy, with which people will 
 wait upon the world to catch its favour, to be 
 admitted into society, to sit at the tables of rich 
 men, to be known as the acquaintance of those 
 who bear titled names, the mean fawning obsequi- 
 ousness of those who wait upon the world — where 
 this is in a man's heart, he is not the disciple of 
 Jesus Christ. Our Lord Himself has warned us: 
 ' How can you believe, who receive glory one from 
 another, and the glorj' which is from God alone, 
 you do not seekf^^ The worship of the world, and 
 the bondage of the world, the fear of losing its 
 favour, or the fear of incurring its ridicule, de- 
 grades millions of men who were created to the 
 image of God, and as men, if not as Christians, 
 ought to be ashamed of such meanness. Sm-ely, 
 St. John V. 44. 
 
AGAINST GOD. 61 
 
 if the law of God were in them, as a living and 
 constraining principle governing their conscience, 
 it would elevate them above the world and all its 
 works. 
 
 4. One more example of this subtle worldli- 
 ness may be found where it is least suspected. 
 It has invaded not only society, it has also in- 
 vaded religion ; it has entered into the sanc- 
 tuary. In the beginning, Christians worshipped 
 God in catacombs at the peril of then- lives ; they 
 offered the Holy Sacrifice in vaults of the earth, 
 in damp dark caverns with altars of rough-hewn 
 stone, and with lamps which hardly gave light ; 
 in hardness, and in austerity, and in poverty. 
 There was the spirit of martyrdom in those days. 
 Afterwards, when the peace of the Church began, 
 the world turned to shine upon it, and the Church 
 then worshipped God in basilicas in the noonday 
 sun. Once, as the Fathers said, its vessels were 
 wood and its priests were gold. Now, its ves- 
 sels at least were of gold. Heresies and schisms 
 sprung up in the midst of splendour; men fled 
 into the deserts, and set up once more altars of 
 stone and crucifixes of wood, that they might 
 worship God in the severity and sanctity of 
 
62 THE REVOLT OF THE WILL 
 
 spirit and of truth. External splendour of worship 
 is good, but internal truth and reality in the wor- 
 ship of God is better. It is right, indeed, and ac- 
 cording both to the Divine law and to the pattern 
 of God's own appointment, that the noblest and 
 the best gifts of human skill and of human wealth 
 should be consecrated to His honour. The Chris- 
 tian Church, as soon as it was able to follow the 
 example of the saints of the Old Law, offered its 
 costliest and best to the worship of God. The 
 murmuring and declaiming that we hear about 
 the simplicity of worship has in it the spirit of 
 him who cast up for how much the ointment might 
 have been sold ; not that he cared for the poor. 
 This carping against the Catholic Church for the 
 splendour of its worship covers a disposition to 
 carp against the truth. No, the Church of God 
 by its history bears witness that the service of 
 God in spirit and in truth requires no external 
 splendour. It accepts, indeed, all that the art of 
 man can do in architecture, in painting, in sculp- 
 ture, in music, because all these come from God 
 and ought to be consecrated to God. The warn- 
 ing of the Lord by the prophet rings in the ears 
 of Christians : ' Is it time for you to dwell in 
 
AGAINST GOD. 63 
 
 ceiled houses, and this house lie desolate V^^ It is 
 true of us also that the wealth spent upon the 
 private dwellings of men exceeds ten thousand- 
 fold that which is spent upon the honour and 
 worship of God. The Church, therefore, both 
 consecrates all things to God's service, and also 
 sustains the same spirit of austere interior wor- 
 ship as in the beginning ; and the Church has in 
 all ages, by its chief Orders, kept up its testimony 
 that the worship of God, in spirit and in truth, 
 does not need external splendour. St. Francis 
 laid down as the law for his children — the most 
 numerous family in the Catholic Church — that 
 upon the altar there should be candlesticks of 
 wood, and that the vestments of the priest should 
 have no silk. You will not misunderstand me, then, 
 when I say that the spirit of the world will often 
 enter into the splendour of the sanctuary, and that 
 the sounds which fill the ear, and the beauty which 
 fills the eye, may take away the heart and the 
 mind. Unless there be the spirit of prayer and 
 union with our Divine Lord in the heart, men 
 may come and go -without worshipping God in 
 spirit and in truth. This is one of our most subtle 
 " Aggeens i. i. 
 
64 THE REVOLT OF THE WILL 
 
 dangers. Satan knows well how to pass off the 
 intellectual simulation of religious opinion for 
 Divine faith ; how to pass off imaginative dream- 
 ings about the perfections of saints for practical 
 obedience ; how to fill men's imaginations with 
 ideas of asceticism while their lives are self-indul- 
 gent; and to make even the splendours, sweetness, 
 beauty, and majesty of Catholic worship a fasci- 
 nation of the sense and a distraction of the soul. 
 The tempter is always busy, and nowhere changes 
 himself into an angel of light so easily as in church. 
 Now, I ask, have you been enough on your 
 guard against this 1 The Catholic Church, lavish 
 as it is in all splendours, because all things, are 
 due to Him who is the Giver of all, has sure and 
 deep correctives to recall its children from the 
 mere fascinations of sense by the eye, or the 
 ear, or the imagination, to the presence of God. 
 Where Jesus is present in the Blessed Sacrament, no 
 splendour can easily withdraw the mind from Him ; 
 or if any become lukewarm, there is a prompt and 
 strong remedy in the confessional. They who 
 live in spirit and in truth will adore in spirit and in 
 truth, as well in the majesty of a basilica as in the 
 austerity of a catacomb. The interior spirit vivi- 
 
AGAINST GOD. 65 
 
 fies all exterior forms. Ceremonies are a mere mask 
 to the unbelieving and the undevout. They are the 
 folds of the Divine Presence, the countenance of 
 the unseen Majesty, to those that believe and love. 
 5. The last and the only other point on which 
 1 will speak is one which threatens us all, and that 
 is, compromise. The days in which we live are not 
 days of firmness. People who still retain a belief 
 in revelation nevertheless hear so much against 
 dogma, that they are often tempted to use the 
 same language, and to disclaim dogmatism. They 
 hear so much said against asceticism, that they 
 try to show their freedom from it by a liberty 
 which is dangerous. But religion without dogma 
 is not Christianity, and religion without asceticism 
 is not the religion by which we can be saved. The 
 religion of Jesus Christ began in the preaching of 
 John : ' Do penance ; for the kingdom of heaven is 
 at hand.'^* There can be no repentance without 
 the mortification of the senses. The times in 
 which we live are perhaps, of all times since the 
 beginning of the Church, the least ascetic. The 
 luxury, the worldliness, the superabundance of all 
 that is grand and beautiful even in the external 
 ■> St. Matt. iii. 2. 
 
 p 
 
66 THE REVOLT OF THE 'WILI. 
 
 woi-ship of the Church, may help to lead men away. 
 The fault indeed is theirs. They can turn anything 
 into temptation; everything will be a snare if 
 they will not correct it by a spirit of obedience to 
 the law of God. Now, there are many marks of 
 this shallow mind .among us First, there is little 
 mortification of the intellect : the intellect ranges 
 without check and without limit; men read every 
 book that comes to hand, every newspaper they find 
 on the table. They do not ask whether it is for the 
 Faith, or against the Faith ; is it heretical, or is it 
 sound; is it pure, or is it impiu'e. They begin 
 without discrimination; they read on without fear; 
 they find the book to be heretical, erroneous, scan- 
 dalous, licentious, and yet they do not burn it; 
 they do not even put it down. The Catholic 
 Church strictly and wisely prohibits the reading of 
 any books that are written by those who have fallen 
 from the Faith, or teach a false doctrine, or im- 
 pugn the Faith, or defend errors. And that for 
 this plain and sound reason : the Church knows 
 very well that it is not one in a thousand who is 
 able to unravel the subtlety of infidel objections. 
 How many of you have gone through for your- 
 Btilves the evidence upon which the autheu- 
 
AGAINST GOD. 67 
 
 ticity, genuineness, and inspiration of the Book 
 of Daniel rests ? Have you verified the canon of 
 the Old and New Testament'? or have you mas- 
 tered the philosophical refutation of Atheism? 
 Would you advise your children to read sceptical 
 criticisms of Holy Scripture, or the arguments of 
 Deists'? If not, why read them yourselves ? You 
 know perfectly well that the human mind is ca- 
 pable of creating many difficulties of which it is 
 incapable of finding a solution. The most crude 
 and ignorant mind is capable of taking in wjiat 
 can be said against truth. Destruction is easy; 
 construction needs time, industry, and care. To 
 gather evidence, or to ascertain the traditions 
 of the Chm-ch, needs learning and labour, of 
 which only they are capable whose life is given 
 to it. 
 
 This indiscriminate and fearless reading is in- 
 tellectual license; but if the intellect be not mor- 
 tified, where will be the mortification of the will '? 
 Look at society, as it is called. What signs are 
 there of mortification of the will amongst us '? 
 When do men willingly forego anything which is 
 for their interest or their pleasure ? When do 
 they leave anything undone simply for conscience, 
 
68 THE EEVOLT OF THE WILL 
 
 or do anything contrary to their interest for the 
 sake of Jesus Christ ? I am afraid that it is the 
 individual and the unit that does these things. 
 But is this religion witliout the Cross the religion 
 of Jesus Christ "? Let us put it to the test. Take 
 the Holy Scriptures in your hands, read them as 
 they stand, do not explain them away : they are the 
 word of God. Do not say it only means this, or it 
 only means that. It means what it says — what God 
 has written — and nothing else. Now hear what 
 is written : ' How hardly shall they that have riches 
 enter into the kingdom of God ! It is easier for a 
 camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for 
 a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.'^* 
 Again, our Lord has said: 'Woe to you that are 
 rich ; for you have received your consolation.'^* 
 Again, He said : ' Enter ye in at the narrow gate ; 
 for wide is the gate, and broad is the way that 
 leadeth to destruction, and many they are who go 
 in thereat. How narrow is the gate, and strait 
 is the way that leadeth to life ; and few there are 
 that find it.'^^ And once more, when a man asked 
 Him: Are theyfewthat are saved? He said: 'Strive 
 to enter in by the narrow gate ; for many, I say to 
 » St. Mark x. 23, 25. » St. Luke vi. 24. " St. Matt. vu. 13, 14. 
 
AGAINST GOD. 69 
 
 you, shall seek to enter, and shall not be able. But 
 ■when the master of the house shall be gone in, and 
 shall shut to the door, you shall begin to stand 
 without, and knock at the door, saying. Lord, open 
 to us : and he answering shall say to you, I know 
 you not, whence you are.'" Once more, He says : 
 ' Whosoever doth not carry his cross and come 
 after Me, cannot be My disciple.'^^ 
 
 These are the warnings of our Lord and Saviour.. 
 Take the crucifix in your hand, and ask yourselves 
 whether this is the religion of the soft, easy, 
 worldly, luxui-ious days in which we live ; whether 
 the crucifix does not teach you a lesson of mor- 
 tification, of self-denial, of crucifixion of the flesh, 
 with its affections and lusts, as the Apostle says ; 
 or as our Divine Lord Himself has said : ' If thy 
 right hand offend thee, cut it ofi'andcast it from thee. 
 If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it 
 from thee ; for it is better to enter into life having 
 one eye and one hand, than having two eyes and 
 two hands to be cast into hell-fire.' These are the 
 words of God, of Jesus, our merciful, loving, com- 
 passionate Lord. They are not the words of 
 severe and heartless men. They are the words 
 " St. Luke xiii. 24, 25. " lb. jdv. 27. 
 
70 THE REVOLT OF THE WHLiL AGAINST GOD. 
 
 of Divine pity, warning us that ' the wisdom of 
 the flesh is death,' because the wisdom of the flesh 
 is an enemy against God, and cannot be subject 
 to the law of God. 
 
 Let us, then, be on our guard against these 
 things, which, in theii- subtlety and strength, have 
 power over us all. If we had one foot in heaven, 
 and were to leave off mortifying ourselves, we 
 should fall from grace. 
 
LECTURE III. 
 
 THE REVOLT OF SOGIETT FROM GOD. 
 
 ' The nation and the kingdom that will not serve Tliee 
 shall perish.' Isaias Ix. 12. 
 
 These words are the promise of God to His Incar- 
 nate 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.'^ The Son of God de- 
 clares of Himself: ' I am appointed King by Him 
 over Sion His holy mountain.'^ Before He as- 
 cended 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 is, I give — ' unto you a kingdom, as My Father 
 has disposed tmto Me.'^ This kingdom, then, is 
 
 ■ Ps. cix. 1, 2. ' Ibid. ii. 6. 
 
 » St. Matt, xxviii. 18 ; St. Luke xxii. 29. 
 
72 THE REVOLT OF SOCIETY 
 
 the kingdom of Jesus Christ; and the prophecy 
 here is, that any nation or any kingdom that will 
 not servo Ilim shall perish. Any nation or king- 
 dom 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 pro- 
 clamation of the coming of this kingdom was first 
 made in a multitude of tongues, and from Jeru- 
 salem 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, IVxAJesty, 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 ot God. When 
 I say the revolt of man, I do not only mean of 
 indi\"}dual8, one by one, but of mankind in its 
 organised 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 
 
PROM GOD. 73 
 
 three periods : the first, when the Church as a 
 sph-itual 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 poli- 
 tical 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 thu'd is the period which for the last three hun- 
 dred 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 com- 
 ing 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, de- 
 scribing the progress of the world in these three 
 divisions. The writer says that there are three 
 
74 THE REVOLT OF SOCIETT 
 
 chief cities which have affected the destinies of the 
 civilised world. The first is Jerusalem, from 
 which the Law, the religion of Israel, flowed by tra- 
 dition into the world. The second is the city of 
 Kome, 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 civilisation, the city of progress, and the city of 
 the future. While I recite these words, your own 
 thoughts are beginning to 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, go- 
 vernments and legislatures, newspapers and poli- 
 ticians, 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 un- 
 derstand its meaning. This Syllabus is sup- 
 posed to be a violent and mediceval aggression 
 
FROM GOD. 75 
 
 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 mul- 
 titude 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 Sylla- 
 bus 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 au- 
 thority ; secondly, that in conflicts between the 
 spiritual and civil authorities, the civil autho- 
 rity is supreme, and must determine ; thirdly, 
 that education belongs to the State, as being what 
 is called matter of civil competence, and ought 
 
76 THE REVOLT OF SOCIETT 
 
 to be strictly secular; fourthly, tliat 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.* 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 Syllabus are errors similar in kind. What I 
 purpose to do is, incidentally, and without again 
 reciting them, to show that these are five false- 
 hoods, 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 bej^ond their limits and exceed 
 theu' 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 
 
 • Syllabus Pii IX., Propp. 39, 42, 45, 54, 55. 
 
FROM GOD. 77 
 
 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 pea- 
 sants 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 them- 
 selves 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 com- 
 manded you.' Who, then, are the guardians of 
 the moral law? The Apostles and their successors. 
 
78 THE REVOLT OF SOCIETY 
 
 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 indi- 
 viduals, and peoples, and nations, and king- 
 doms, 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 
 apostasy, 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 se- 
 parate, 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 endeavouring 
 
FROM GOD. 79 
 
 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 na- 
 tions 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 siich 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 politi- 
 cal 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 liv- 
 ing 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, whatso- 
 ever 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 
 
80 THE REVOLT OF SOCIETY 
 
 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 prin- 
 ciples 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 em- 
 bodied in diiferent 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 or- 
 dained of God. He that resisteth the power, re- 
 sisteth 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 1 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.'^ From what 
 other source could the authority to inflict 
 • Bom. xiii. 1. 
 
FROM GOD. 81 
 
 capital punishment be derived, save only from 
 Him who is the Author and Giver of life? So- 
 ciety recognises the Divine foundation of its autho- 
 rity 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 govern- 
 ment, whether it be by one or by many, whether 
 it be empire or kingdom or republic — these mut- 
 able 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 
 
 G 
 
82 THE REVOLT OF SOCIETY 
 
 ceutiiiy 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, 
 Mliich should never be destroyed; of which the 
 ^rophe^ haf said. ^ It shall not be delivered up to 
 
FROM GOD. 83 
 
 another people.'^ 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 en- 
 dure 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 legislatm-e, to its 
 own executive, and to its own tribunals. It re- 
 ceives 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 house- 
 holds, and peoples, and nations, and cities, and 
 kingdoms. It reached, at last, to the palace of 
 the Csesars; it took possession of the imperial 
 * I>amel ii. 41. 
 
84 THE REVOLT OF SOCIETT 
 
 family; it converted the emperor on his throne: 
 and when it had pervaded the senate, and the 
 tribtmals, and the whole civil life of Rome, the 
 empire was elevated above itself. It became re- 
 generate 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 civilisation, was purged by fire and by blood. 
 The kingdom of Jesus Christ then took posses- 
 sion of the civil society of the world. Then 
 passed away the old civilisation, which was cor- 
 rupt 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 judg- 
 
FROM GOD. 8'5 
 
 ments 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 civilisation 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 civilisation. 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 thanks- 
 giving to their Redeemer the power of life and 
 death over wives ; when the horrors, and injus- 
 tice, 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 imder 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 
 Bway over the three-and-twenty patrimonies of 
 
86 THE REVOLT OF SOCIETY 
 
 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 Medi- 
 terranean. 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 Christmas-day 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 hun- 
 dred years a Christendom in which the kings 
 and princes of Europe acknowledged the sove- 
 reignty of Jesus Christ; the nations and the 
 kingdoms sei'ved Him, and inherited the bene- 
 diction 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 
 
FROM GOD. 87 
 
 at tlie 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 rites 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 Al- 
 mighty 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, jus- 
 tice, and peace, according to the laws of the land 
 and the canons of the Church. He then lay pros- 
 trate 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. 
 
88 THE REVOLT OF SOCIETY 
 
 typical of royal power; as in the prophecy, ' The 
 government is upon His shoulder.''^ He then 
 received the sword, with this admonition, ' Re- 
 member 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 por- 
 trayed 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 
 ' Isaias ix. 6. 
 
FROM GOD. 80 
 
 themselves formally from the unity of the Faith 
 and Chm-ch, and therein of the supreme authority of 
 the Vicar of Jesus Christ. What straightway fol- 
 lowed I 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 spiri- 
 tual, which God has made distinct and has com- 
 mitted 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 ot 
 Jesus Christ alone. The authority over con- 
 science, 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 
 
90 THE REVOLT OF SOCIETT 
 
 and in blood the people that were torn from the 
 unity of the Church suffered for that deed. I will 
 eay nothing of Ireland — the memories of Ireland 
 are too mournful, too profoundly dark — but Eng- 
 land, 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 reli- 
 gion 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 I From the usurpation of the civil authority, 
 which assumed to itself to be the head and su- 
 preme judge in religion. 
 
 But I pass this by. These were only the be- 
 ginning of troubles which fell upon the nations 
 separated from the unity of the Church. There 
 was also a ilood of evils in countries that still 
 continued to be of that unity. In France, in Aus- 
 
FROM GOD. 91 
 
 tria, 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 oould not touch faith ; but 
 discipline and all things outside of faith they 
 claimed as subject to their jurisdiction. 
 
 I have said that there is, in all countries, a dis- 
 position to depart from the unity of the Christian 
 civilisation which the providence of God has or- 
 dained. 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 na- 
 tions' 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 the- 
 ology in the universities of the kingdom. 
 
92 THE REVOLT OF SOCIETY 
 
 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 conse- 
 quence of that divorce — the desecration of civil so- 
 ciety, 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 ten- 
 derness of sympathy. If any word I speak should 
 seem to be wounding to noble, Christian, Ca- 
 tholic, 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 
 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 
 
FROM GOD. 93 
 
 were two of the greatest pestilences at that tune 
 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 re- 
 member how the worship of Christianity was then 
 abolished, the name of Jesus Christ blasphemed, 
 the church of Notre Dame profaned ; Reason, per- 
 sonified 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 As- 
 sembly 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. 
 
94 THE REVOLT OF SOGIETT 
 
 They sank so deep, that never to this day has 
 Atheism been finally eradicated. In the midst of 
 that noble, Chi-istiau, Catholic people, the roots of 
 infidelity are now so deeply set, and the taint of 
 indifferentism is so wide, that all the prayers, 
 labours, sufferings of the faithful and fervent can- 
 not 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 run- 
 ning 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 won- 
 dered 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 d little while all religion will disappear from 
 the schools of the Commune ; the crucifix will dis- 
 appear as a violation of liberty of conscience.' A 
 little while afterwards there was a question whe- 
 
FROM GOD. 95 
 
 ther or not tlie churches should be closed; and it 
 ■^I'as answered, ' That the churches be kept open, 
 and that in them Atheism shall be taught, to dis- 
 abuse the minds of men from the prejudice of 
 belief.' And do we, then, wonder that the chief 
 pastor of that ilock 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 pro- 
 phets 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 honour by some in England, and has disciples 
 among us, who teach the same intellectual enor- 
 mities. These are his words : ' In the name of 
 Ihe past and the future, the servants of human- 
 ity, both its philosophical and practical servants 
 — come forward to claim as their due the gen- 
 eral direction of this world. Their object is 
 to constitute at length a real Providence in all 
 departments, moral, intellectual, and material. 
 
96 THE REVOLT OF SOCIETY 
 
 Consequently, they exclude once for all, from poli- 
 tical supremacy, all the different servants of God, 
 Catholic, Protestant, or Deist, as being at once be- 
 hindhand and a cause of disturbance.'* I told you 
 in the beginning, of the three cities typical of 
 civilisation, and that the new Jerusalem of pro- 
 gress is Paris. We see that new Jerusalem at 
 this moment illuminated, not with the light of God 
 and of the Lamb, but by the flames of its burning 
 palaces, and by the conflagration of its homes. 
 And to what one supreme cause is this to be as- 
 cribed? To the rejection of God and of His Christ, 
 to the rejection of the sovereignty of our Divine 
 Redeemer. ' The nation and the kingdom that will 
 not serve Him shall perish ;' and noble, Christian, 
 Catholic France, except it acknowledge once 
 more the sovereignty of Jesus Christ, by that 
 Divine law of prophecy must perish. But I have 
 better hopes. I know, from my own personal 
 knowledge, that through the provinces of that 
 noble people there are millions who are true and 
 faithful. They are casting off, by the almighty 
 help of God, the tyranny and the dominion of 
 a corrupt and infidel sect. 
 
 • Catechism of Positive Religion, preface. 
 
FROM GOD. 97 
 
 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 work- 
 ing out, of the principles of infidelity and impiety 
 which were set in motion a century ago. Aud 
 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 overthi-ow 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 ori- 
 gin of all right, and cannot be circumscribed. The 
 Church of God and God Himself are the foxmtain 
 
 H 
 
98 THE REVOLT OF SOCIETY 
 
 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 con- 
 demned, 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 baptised children must be ac- 
 cording 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 
 Cliurch ought to be separated from the State, and 
 the State from the Church, is a falsehood and an 
 
FROM GOD. 99 
 
 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 iii 
 union. They ought to act in concord, co-operat- 
 ing 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 them- 
 selves from the authority of God and of His Church, 
 are cornmitting 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 
 
100 THE REVOLT OF SOCIETT 
 
 of the Cliurcli. 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 in- 
 visible, 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. ' ye kings, 
 understand : receive instruction, you that judge 
 the earth.'' 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 recogni- 
 tion that there is a King in heaven. Who is repre- 
 sented upon earth, and that on earth there is one 
 fi'om whom the interpretation of His law, and the 
 • Ps. U. 10. 
 
FROM GOD. 101 
 
 sentence of His truth, comes with supreme au- 
 thority? In this person alone are united toge- 
 ther 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 Chris- 
 tian civilisation 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. 
 
102 THE REVOLT OF SOCIETY 
 
 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. To-morrow, 
 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, tm-n 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 con- 
 vinced 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 clamour of a revolt- 
 ing and unbelieving age. Remember the w^ords of 
 the Son of God: 'You shall know the ti'uth, and 
 the truth shall make you free.'" ' If the Son shall 
 make you free, you shall be free indeed.'^'' 
 
 Liberty without Jesus Christ is the worst of 
 " St. John viu. 32. " Ibid. 36. 
 
FROM GOD. 103 
 
 bondage. The service of Jesus Christ is true 
 liberty. Remember His own words : ' Come to 
 Me, all you that labour, 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 bm-den light.'^^ 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.'^* 
 
 '« St. Matt. xi. 28-30. " 1 Cor. xv. 25. 
 
LECTURE IV. 
 
 THE SPIRIT OF ANTICHRIST. 
 
 ' If the world hate you, hiow ye that it hath hated Me 
 before you. If you had been of the world, the world 
 would love its own ; but because you are not of the 
 world, but I have chosen you out of the world, there- 
 fore the world hateth you.^ St. John xv. 18, 19. 
 
 Mask it as we may, there is an irreconcilable en- 
 mity between God and the world. The Christian 
 world may put on the vestments and bear the 
 name of Christianity, but it is the world, after all. 
 Not that there is enmity on God's part against 
 the world ; for ' God so loved the world as to 
 give His only - begotten Son ; that whosoever 
 ■believeth in Him, may not perish, but may have 
 life everlasting.'^ But 'the friendship of this world 
 
 > St. John iii. 16. 
 
THE SPIRIT OF ANTICHRIST. 105 
 
 is an enemy against God,' as we have already 
 seen, because it is not subject to the law of God, 
 nor can be. 
 
 This then is the meaning of our Lord's words 
 when He said to the Apostles, who were becom- 
 ing daily conscious of the hatred of men against 
 them : ' If the world hate you, know ye that it 
 hath hated Me before you.'^ If you had been of 
 the world — servants, friends, flatterers of the 
 world — the world would have loved its own, it 
 would have recognised its own reflection, its own 
 mind, its own livery ; but because you are not of 
 the world, but I, by grace and special election, 
 have chosen you out of the world, therefore, for 
 that very reason, because you have My mark, be- 
 cause you bear My name, because, in some degree, 
 you share My likeness ; therefore the world hateth 
 you. This enmity is perpetual: it exists at this 
 day, it will exist to the end. Between God and 
 the world there may be an apparent truce ; there 
 never can be peace. God is immutable ; His per- 
 fections cannot change. The world is malicious, 
 and from its malice it will not change ; and 
 therefore, as the Apostle says, ' What participation 
 2 St. John XT. 18. 
 
106 THE SPIRIT OF ANTICHRIST. 
 
 hath justice with injustice ? what concord hath 
 Christ with Belial f * God, then, when manifest in 
 the flesh, in the person of the eternal Son, was the 
 object of the world's chief hatred; and the world, 
 after wreaking upon Him all that scorn, derision, 
 insults could effect, nailed Him upon the cross. 
 The shame and the passion of the Incarnate Son of 
 God has been the inheritance of His Church. For 
 what is the Church of Christ but the body of 
 Christ 1 Or, in other words, it is Christ mystical, 
 the mystical person made up, as St. Augustine 
 says, of the divine Head in heaven and of the 
 body spread throughout the world; ' one man, one 
 collective person.' The enmity and the hatred 
 which the world bore to Him has descended from 
 generation to generation, as the heirloom of His 
 body. This, then, is Christ. Now what is Anti- 
 christ 1 
 
 In the beginning I disclaimed all intention of 
 entering into the exposition of unfulfilled pro- 
 phecies. I am speaking of patent facts under our 
 eyes. They are sufficient, because they give us 
 principles and warnings to govern our conduct. 
 Nevertheless, I must say, in passing, that if there 
 » 2 Cor. vi. li. 15. 
 
THE SPIUIT OF ANTICHRIST. 107 
 
 be anything evident in the plain words of Holy 
 Scripture, if there be anything explicitly declared 
 by the Christian Fathers, and anything distinctly 
 taught by the theologians of the Church, it is this ; 
 that Antichrist, though taken to express a dif- 
 fused spirit which pervades systems and incorpor- 
 ates itself in various forms in all ages, neverthe- 
 less will be, towards the latter days, impersonated 
 in one who shall be the head and the chief of that 
 Antichristian spirit and system, and shall use all 
 his power against the Name and the Church of 
 Jesus Christ. This I now set aside, as being be- 
 yond my purpose. I am speaking of the Anti- 
 christian spirit which manifests itself either in 
 individuals or in whole systems, sometimes in 
 whole nations. Just as the electricity which is 
 suspended in the air is breathed unconsciously, so 
 the Antichristian spirit exists in what is called 
 the Christian world in its present fragmentary and 
 divided state. And this is the subject with which 
 to-night I must conclude that which I have en- 
 deavoured, but very imperfectly, to say. 
 
 I have already drawn out before you the dis- 
 tinction between the world as it was before it had 
 faith in Christ, and as it became when the Christian 
 
108 THE SPIRIT OF ANTICHRIST. 
 
 Faith was received by tlie nations wliicli were fe- 
 derated in what we call Christendom ; and lastly, 
 as it is now, since the world, having once been 
 Christian, has for the last three hundred years 
 been ceasing to be so. 
 
 Now, the Apostle has given us three marks of 
 this final and Antichristian apostasy from the Faith. 
 The first mark is given by St. John, where he says 
 that ' they went out from us, but they were not of 
 us ; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt 
 have remained with us ;'* that is to say, separation 
 or schism, actual and visible departure from the 
 unity of the Church. The second mark is a denial of 
 the Incarnation of the Son of God. St. John says 
 in his second epistle: 'Many seducers are gone out 
 into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ 
 is come in the flesh. This is a seducer and an anti- 
 christ.'* The third mark is given by St. Jude: 'These 
 are they who separate themselves, sensual men,' 
 which word signilies, in the original, men of natural 
 intellect and natural reason ; it does not neces- 
 sarily mean sensual in the grosser sense, though 
 it leads to it. 'These are they who separate them- 
 selves, sensual, not having the Spirit,'* that is, they 
 
 * 1 St. John ii. 19. ' 2 St. John 7. ° St. Jude 19. 
 
THE SPIRIT OF ANTICHRIST. 109 
 
 reject the Holy Ghost, and the work of the Spirit 
 of God in the world. This third mark is the rejec- 
 tion of the revelation of the day of Pentecost, with 
 all those truths, laws, and authorities, which took 
 their rise from the coming of the Spirit of Truth. 
 These then are the three marks of the world de- 
 parting from Christianity. 
 
 If you look back over the last three hundred 
 years, you will see that whole nations have de- 
 parted from the visible unity of the Church. They 
 have come to deny that any visible unity was ever 
 instituted ; they deny their separation by deny- 
 ing the law. 'Where there is no law, there is no 
 transgression,'^ the Apostle says ; and it is neces- 
 sary to deny the law of unity in order to justify 
 the separation. Springing up from those bodies 
 separated from the unity of the Church has come, 
 first, Socinianism or Unitarianism, as it is com- 
 monly called — rejection of the mystery of the Most 
 Holy Trinity, of the Godhead of the Incarnate 
 Son, of the work of the Holy Spirit of God, first 
 in His Divine authority, perpetually and infallibly 
 guiding and speaking through the Church ; next, in 
 His operation through the Holy Sacraments ; and 
 ' Bom. iv. 15. 
 
110 THE SPIRIT OF ANTICHRIST. 
 
 thirdly, His workings of grace in the individual 
 soul. How extensively, both in speculation and 
 in practice, these truths are at this time rejected by 
 many Avho retain the name of Christians, you well 
 know. And once m.ore, if you look at nations in 
 which these departures from truth are to be 
 found, you will find that the whole course of legis- 
 lation for the last three hundred years has been, 
 as I have already pointed out, a perpetual de- 
 parture from the laws of Christianity. Foras- 
 much, then, as men are interminably and irreconcil- 
 ably divided, it is impossible that the legislature 
 can touch upon matters of Christianity or of reli- 
 gion without conflicting with the private convic- 
 tions or the private opinions of some men or 
 somebodies of men; and therefore the civil powers 
 of the world in despair have taken refuge in the 
 policy of eliminating and excluding altogether 
 from the public laws of the land all reference to 
 anything but those fundamental moral axioms 
 which are to be found not only in Christianity, 
 but, almost without exception, in the order of 
 nature. 
 
 There is to be found in such individuals as I 
 have been describing, in such nations and in such 
 
THE SPIRIT OF ANTICHRIST. Ill 
 
 governments, a worldly character, which partakes 
 of the Antichristian spirit. These may seem to be 
 harsh and severe terms, but ' he that is not with 
 Me, is against Me.'* They are the words of Jesus 
 Christ Himself. There is no neutrality in matters ' 
 of faith ; and the tendency of all peoples, nations, 
 and governments that have ceased to legislate 
 positively in a Christian sense, is to legislate at 
 last in a sense that is, first beside, then contrary 
 to, Christianity. 
 
 What I have now to do is to draw out the 
 particular points in which the Antichristian spirit 
 is to be found working in society, and therefore 
 round about us. 
 
 1. The first illustration I will give is this : 
 the impatience of all revealed authority, as 
 entering in any degree into the control of the 
 thoughts or the wiU of men, or into the ac- 
 tion of government. There is a disposition in 
 public opinion, and in public men, and in the 
 masses, to say : ' Politics have nothing to do with 
 religion.' This I have answered before ; and I am 
 going on to show one more application of this 
 false maxim. It is commonly said, that what is 
 • St. Matt. xu. 30. 
 
112 THE SPIRIT OF ANTICHRIST. 
 
 called ' dogma' is a limitation of the liberty of the 
 human reason ; that it is degrading to a rational 
 being to allow his intellect to be limited by dog- 
 matic Christianity; that liberty of thought, liberty 
 of discovery, the progress of advancing truth, 
 apply equally to Christianity, if it be true, as to 
 all other kinds of truth ; and therefore a man, 
 when he allows his intellect to be subjected by 
 dogma, has allowed himself to be brought into 
 an intellectual bondage. Well, now, let me test 
 the accuracy and the value of this supposed axiom. 
 The science of astronomy has been a traditional 
 science for I know not how many generations of 
 men. It has been perpetually advancing, ex- 
 panding, testing, completing its discoveries, and 
 demonstrating the truth of its theories and its 
 inductions. Now, every single astronomical truth 
 imposes a limit upon the intellect of man. When 
 once the truth has been demonstrated there is no 
 further question about it. The intellect of man 
 is thenceforward limited in respect of that truth. 
 He cannot any longer contradict it without losing 
 his dignity as a man of science — I might say, as a 
 rational creature. It appears, therefore, that the 
 certainty of every scientific truth imposes a cer- 
 
THE SPIRIT W ANTICHRIST. 113 
 
 tain limitation upon the intellect ; and yet scien- 
 tific men tell us that, in proportion as science is 
 expanded by new discoveries and new demonstra- 
 tions, the field of knowledge is increased. Well, 
 then, I ask, in the name of common justice and of 
 common sense, why may I not apply this to re- 
 velation 1 If the possession of a scientific truth, 
 with its complete scientific accuracy, be not a limi- 
 tation, and is therefore no degradation of the hu- 
 man intellect, but an elevation and an expansion of 
 its range, why should the defined and precise 
 doctrines of revelation be a bondage against which 
 the intellect of man ought to rebel ? On the con- 
 trary, I affirm that every revealed doctrine is a 
 limitation imposed upon the field of error. The 
 regions in which men may err become narrower, 
 because the boundaries of truth are pushed farther, 
 and the field of truth is enlarged. The liberty of the 
 human intellect is therefore greater, because it is 
 in possession of a greater inheritance of certainty. 
 And yet, if there be one superstition which at the 
 present day is undermining more than any other 
 the faith of men, it is the notion that belief in the 
 positive dogma of Christianity is a slavish limi- 
 tation of the intellectual freedom of man. 
 
 I 
 
114 THE SPIRIT OF ANTICHRIST. 
 
 Once more, it is said that the revealed moral- 
 ity of Christianity is a limitation of the freedom 
 of the human will. I must ask your forbearance 
 for speaking of such a topic to you ; for I ought to 
 suppose that there is no one here so darkened, I 
 must say, in heart as well as in understanding as 
 to think that Christian morality, by limiting the 
 actions and even the thoughts, and regulating the 
 freedom of the will, imposes upon them a bondage 
 unworthy of men. Nevertheless, there are some 
 who cry out against the laws of morality which are 
 taught by the Church of Jesus Christ, as being an 
 interference with human liberty. Now, what does 
 the morality of the Christian law forbid 1 First, all 
 things that are unjust. Surely no man will plead 
 for a liberty to act unjustly. Secondly, all things 
 that are hurtful to himself or to his neighbour. A. 
 jnan will not plead for liberty to do hurt to his 
 neighbour. Will he plead for liberty to do hurt to 
 himself? to commit suicide, for instance — that is, for 
 the liberty of self-murder 1 Lastly, it forbids the 
 commission of those things that are mortal before 
 God , of acts that are deadly in their consequences. 
 in the name of reason I would ask you, is there any 
 limit imposed upon the liberty of men in taking 
 
THE SPIRIT OF ANTICHRIST. 115 
 
 from them the freedom to drink poison, and laying 
 upon them the bondage of Hving on food? And 
 yet the laws of the Church impose no other limita- 
 tion on any man. Nevertheless, the spirit of insub- 
 ordinate intellect and insubordinate will, fostered 
 by schism and by unbelief, is spreading fast at 
 this day; and men are crying out against the 
 authority of revelation as a yoke and a bondage. 
 
 And it is further said, that revelation has no- 
 thing to do with the civil authority of the world. I 
 hope that I have already given reason enough for 
 affirming that the civil authority of the world, if 
 it be not founded upon revelation, is, nevertheless, 
 so guided, confirmed, and strengthened by it, that 
 it cannot long subsist without it. If it lose the sup- 
 port and guidance of revelation, it soon falls into 
 the natural order, with all the penalties of dis- 
 solution. Now, what limit does revelation im- 
 pose upon the civil power! It limits authority, in 
 those tliat bear it, to the execution of justice and 
 mercy; it forbids tyranny and despotism. It 
 limits the freedom of subjects by the law of con- 
 scien ce, to obedience and submission ; an d it teaches 
 man to observe the equal rights of other men and 
 the duties which he owes to his fellows. It 
 
11 6 THE SPIRIT OF ANTICHRIST, 
 
 teaches to all men the sacred law which lies at the 
 base of all just legislation : 'Do to others as 
 you would have men do to you.' These are the 
 primary laws of justice and of charity. I ask whe- 
 ther these are limitations hostile to the freedom 
 or to the prosperity of states '? In one word, the 
 only conservative spirit, a phrase we hear even 
 to weariness — that which alone upholds, con- 
 firms, and renders indissoluble the civil society of 
 ipaankind — is Christianity, or the revelation and the 
 laws of Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, if there be 
 anything which the public opinion of most coun- 
 tries, separated from the unity of the Church — 
 and, I am sorry to say, the public opinion of some 
 countries which profess still to be within that 
 unity — resents, it is the entrance of the laws of 
 revelation into the sphere of their legislature. I 
 shall not say too much by adding, that there 
 exists a widespread animosity against the one 
 only Church which will not accept of royal or 
 legislative supremacy. There is in the world one 
 Church which has never accepted of royal supre- 
 macy in faith or morals. It has never accepted 
 Acts of Parliament or legislative enactments as 
 Buperior to its OAvn canonical legislation and to its 
 
THE SPIRIT OF ANTICHRIST. 117 
 
 own spiritual executive. Now, I believe, that is 
 the only Church against which public animosity 
 and even private hostility is levelled in any marked 
 degree. All other bodies are treated as national, 
 domestic, and innocuous. They are not to be 
 feared. If they have a will of their own, they 
 have no power to exert it. But the Church which 
 absolutely refuses the supremacy of all civil powers 
 is looked upon at once as aggression, invasion, 
 and a menace to the supreme authority of public 
 opinion, and, it may be, of princes. 
 
 2. Why is thisi In one word, because the enmity 
 which assails revelation falls upon it chiefly as in- 
 corporated in the Church. It exists there as in a 
 definite, visible, palpable form. In the sphere of 
 intellect men cannot lay their hands on revelation. 
 It is, like the light of day, impalpable. In the order 
 and the sphere of ideas it is intangible altoge- 
 ther; but, embodied in the Church, it becomes a 
 visible and palpable impersonation, standing in 
 the place of its Divine Head, on whom men laid 
 their hands while He was within arm's length. 
 But now, at the right hand of God, He is beyond 
 their reach. His body, however, is here; and there- 
 fore He ci-ied out to Saul on the way to Damascus, 
 
118 THE SPIRIT OF ANTICHRIST. 
 
 ' Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me f — that is 
 to say, His Church upon earth is Himself. The 
 same spirit, therefore, which was directed against 
 Him while He was within the reach of men is 
 now directed against His Church, which is still 
 palpable and within their grasp. It incorporates 
 dogma, it enforces discipline, it wields authority, 
 it legislates, it decrees, it inflicts censures, it sits 
 in judgment upon the conduct of men, of private 
 persons, of professors, of nations, of princes. Come 
 what may, it will not be silent. Let men threaten 
 as they will, it still speaks as the Prince of the 
 Apostles, who said : ' If it be just in the sight of 
 God to hear you rather than God, judge ye.'^ 
 
 This Divine liberty of speech, which began in 
 the lips of the Son of God Himself, passed to His 
 Apostles, and from them has passed to His Church. 
 It has spoken freely throughout all ages, and 
 throughout all the world. The prerogatives of 
 the Church are especially offensive to the world. 
 Our Lord said to the chief of the Apostles, and 
 through him to them all, and through them to 
 their successors to the end of the world: 'I will 
 give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven; 
 • Acts iv. 19. 
 
THE SPIRIT OF ANTICHRIST, 119 
 
 and whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall 
 be bound also in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt 
 loose upon earth, it shall be loosed also in hea- 
 ven.'^" We do not explain away these words. We 
 teach them as we received them from our Divine 
 Master. They mean that what the authority of 
 His Church binds on earth, is by Him ratiiied in 
 heaven ; that there is a twofold and concm-rent 
 action, which in effect is identical, between the 
 authority of the Church on earth, and the authority 
 of its Divine Head in heaven. And therefore, 
 when the Apostle said: ' If any man love not our 
 Lord Jesus Christ, let him be anathema maran- 
 atha,'he pronounced a judicial sentence which had 
 its effect, though it was not yet seen to follow, as 
 when our Divine Master said to the barren fig-tree, 
 'May no fruit grow on thee henceforward for 
 ever,'-'^^ and the fig-tree withered away; and as 
 when Peter rebuked Ananias and Sapphira, his 
 sentence was straightway executed. We may 
 not see, indeed, these palpable and immediate re- 
 sults ; but we know with Divine certainty that the 
 eiFects of excommunication will surely follow. In 
 the Epistle to the Corinthians the Apostle, writing 
 '» St. Matt. XTi. 19. " Ibid. xxi. 19. 
 
120 THE SPIRIT OF ANTICHRIST. 
 
 of the incestuous man, said: ' T, indeed absent in 
 body, but present in spirit, have ah-eady judged, 
 as though I were present, him who hath so 
 done : in the name of our Lord Jesns Christ, you 
 being gathered together with my spirit, with 
 the power of the Lord Jesus Christ, to deliver 
 such a one to Satan for tlie destruction of the 
 flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of 
 our Lord Jesus Christ.'^^ These are not empty 
 threats; they are judicial pronouncemeiits of a 
 Divine authority. Will any one tell me that this 
 power has ceased in the world? Read the history 
 of sacrilege against the Holy See ; or read, if you 
 will, the history of sacrilege written by a well- 
 known writer of the Church of England two hun- 
 dred years ago, who believed this Christian law, 
 and verified it in the history of those who, three 
 hundred years back, committed or partook of sacri- 
 lege in England. Search through history, and find 
 me an example of sacrilege which has not sooner 
 or later met its doom. There is a God who 
 judgeth the earth; and He judges it through 
 those laws which He incorporated in the authority 
 of His Church. He executes His judgments by His 
 
 >2 1 Cor. T. 3-5. 
 
THE SPIRIT OF ANTICHRIST. 121 
 
 own Divine providence, when and how He wills. 
 Now against that which I have said, there is a spirit 
 of hostility and contempt, at least assumed. I 
 say assumed contempt ; because, under the ap- 
 pearance of derision, there is a sharpness in the 
 tone which shows the animosity of fear. 
 
 3. There is yet another kind of Antichristian 
 enmity, which finds its wa--" 'uto the hearts of many 
 who would be startled and wounded if they 
 were told that their spirit is Antichristian. If 
 there be a subject against which public writers, 
 public speakers, and public talkers are perpetually 
 declaiming, it is what is called the religious life — 
 the life of monks and of nuns. The whole liter- 
 ature of countries that are not Catholic is full of 
 all manner of tales, calumnies, slanders, fables, 
 fictions, absurdities, on the subject of monks and 
 nuns. Now, why should men trouble themselves 
 so much about it? Why cannot they leave peace- 
 ful people to use their own liberty ? No man or 
 woman is compelled to be monk or nun ; and if 
 by perversion of light, if by idiotcy, as the world 
 calls it, any should be found who desire to live 
 the life of monk or nun, why should public opinion 
 trouble itself so much about the matter 1 Men 
 
122 THE SPIRIT OF AXTICIIUIST. 
 
 may become Mormons ; they may settle down at 
 Salt Lake ; they may join any sect ; they may 
 adopt any practices which do not bring them 
 under the hands of tlie pohce, and the pubhc 
 opinion of this country does not trouble itself 
 about them. What, then, is the reason why it 
 troubles itself about the religious life 1 Because 
 it is a life of perfection ; because it is a life which 
 is a rebuke to the world, a direct and diametrical 
 contradiction of the axioms and maxims by which 
 the world governs itself. The world is therefore 
 conscious of the rebuke, and uneasy under that 
 consciousness. When the Son of God came into 
 the world, all men turned against Him except the 
 few whom He called to be His disciples. Even a 
 heathen philosopher has recorded this belief: that 
 if a perfectly just man were ever to be seen on 
 earth, he would be out of place and a wonder ; 
 or, as we may say, a monster amongst men. And 
 why 1 Because, in the universal injustice of man- 
 kind, he would stand alone, and his life would be 
 a rebuke. In Holy Scripture this is described, as 
 it were, with a pencil of light. In the Book of 
 Wisdom, the men of this world say : ' Let us lie 
 in wait for the just ; because he is not for our turn, 
 
THE SPIRIT OF AXTICIIRIST. 123 
 
 and he is contrary to ouv doings, and upbraidetli 
 us with transgressions of the law, and divulgeth 
 against us the sins of our way of hfe ... he 
 abstaineth from our ways as from filthiness, and he 
 preferreth the latter end of the just ... he calleth 
 himself the son of God ... he is grievous unto 
 us even to behold.'^^ The finger of the Holy 
 Spirit has here traced the real analysis of this 
 animosity against the religious life, feome years 
 ago I remember reading a paper upon ' The 
 Extinct Virtues,' and what were theyf Obedi- 
 ence, chastity, voluntary poverty. If so, then, 
 the eight beatitudes are extinct. I do not sup- 
 pose the world would accept this. They would 
 count me a severe and an unjust accuser if I were 
 to say that disorder, unchastity, and the love of 
 riches are the ascendent virtues of modern society. 
 But if obedience, chastity, and voluntary poverty 
 are extinct, their opposites must be in the as- 
 cendent. Of this 1 am sure: that the prevalent 
 spirit amongst men at this day is to feel a secret 
 hostility against a life which surpasses their own; 
 and therefore it is that we hear these tales, fables, 
 glanders, fictions about monks and nuns ; and that 
 ■3 WiBd. ii. 12-16. 
 
124 THE SPIRIT OF AXTICIir.IST. 
 
 ■we have books like La Rdlgieuse and Le Mau- 
 dit; or romances about the acts of ex-Bene- 
 dictine nuns at Naples, and suchlike ; or that 
 which is the gospel of a multitude of people — 
 though it has been exposed a hundred times 
 over as a stupid self-refuting imposture, con- 
 demned and exposed by positive local proof and 
 distinct documentary evidence — the history of 
 ' Maria Monk.' Nevertheless, this abomination is 
 printed and reprinted, and bought and sold, be- 
 cause there is a gross morbid taste to which it 
 panders, and a diseased hatred which it gratifies. 
 It is not only against the life of perfection, but 
 against every reflection of God, wheresoever it 
 may be seen, that this Antichristian animosity di- 
 rects itself. And there are two things which, 
 perhaps, are more hated, more intensely and more 
 bitterly attacked, than any others. 
 
 The first is the confessional, because in it the 
 priest sits in the name of God, hearing all things 
 in His stead, with his lips closed, and ready to shed 
 his blood rather than break that seal. He holds a 
 power which was given him in the Apostles on that 
 night when our Divine Lord breathed upon them, 
 and said, 'Receive ye the Holy Ghost; whose sins 
 
THE SPIRIT OF ANTICHRIST. 125 
 
 you shall forgive, they are forgiven them, and 
 whose sins you shall retain, they are retained.''* 
 He sits there invested with that authority, a wit- 
 ness to the day of judgment; and the self-accu- 
 sation of men is the prelude and the preparation 
 for the last day. The world, if it could, would 
 pull the Last Judge off His throne; but, because 
 He is beyond the reach of its arm, they pull the 
 priest out of the confessional. 
 
 The other thing against which the enmity of 
 men is directed, is the presence of Jesus in the 
 Blessed Sacrament. The Sacrament of the Altar is 
 the manifestation of the Divine presence; it is the 
 incorpoi-ation of the Divine love, sanctity, and 
 power; and against these things the Antichris- 
 tian revolt hurls itself as the chief object of 
 its hatred : as but the other day, if our tidings 
 speak the truth, the Blessed Sacrament was sa- 
 crilegiously mocked and scattered in the midst of 
 blaspheming men and weeping women. 
 
 4. There is yet another object of this animosity. 
 What I said last leads on immediately to the priest- 
 hood. Englishmen have heard from childhood so 
 mxicli about priestcraft, and about being priest-rid- 
 
 » St John XX. 22, 23. 
 
126 THE SPIRIT OF ANTICHRIST. 
 
 den, and about bad priests, that they grow up with a 
 beHef that a priest is a noxious creature, a sort of 
 fera natura, something specially venomous, anti- 
 social, perilous to the commonwealth of men. 
 What is the priesthood 1 The priesthood is a 
 body of men, instituted by our Saviour, into which 
 any man of you, if lie has the will and the fitness, 
 may freely enter to-morrow. It is not a caste ; 
 it is not Freemasonry ; it is not a secret society 
 of moral assassins, nor a close corporation of 
 tyrannous men. It is open to all; it has no 
 secrets but the sins of those that repent. It is 
 the most democratic of all the governments on 
 earth : the sons of peasants and of ploughmen 
 are at this day standing at our altars and sitting 
 upon the throne of Apostles. The Holy Council 
 of Trent lays upon the conscience of bishops, in 
 founding their seminaries, to replenish them rather 
 with the children of the poorer classes. The 
 priesthood, therefore, is so open to every man, 
 that if there be a secret craft, a priestcraft, to 
 be learnt, let him come and learn it ; he has only 
 to blame himself if he does not know all about us. 
 We have no mysteries, or ciphers, or masonic 
 signs. The priesthood and the theology which 
 
THE SPIRIT OF ANTICHRIST. 127 
 
 makes the priest are open to everybody ; it is not 
 like secret sooieties, which hide themselves from 
 the Kght and labour underground. The priesthood 
 is in noonday, standing at the altar, and every- 
 body may know what it is ; and yet we hear of 
 ' sacerdotalism' as if it were the Black Death or a 
 plague of Egypt, or a pestilence w-hich walks 
 in darkness. In the public newspapers men are 
 warned, and hopes are expressed that the world 
 at last may be saved from ' sacerdotalism.' In the 
 fourth chapter of St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephe- 
 sians, we read these words : ' He led captivity 
 captive. He gave gifts to men,' ' and He gave some 
 apostles, and some prophets, and other some evan- 
 gelists, and other some pastors and doctors (or 
 teachers), for the perfecting of the saints, for the 
 work of the mmistry, for the edifying of the body of 
 Christ.'^^ Here is the priesthood: a body of men 
 chosen first by our Lord, illuminated, trained, and 
 conformed to Himself, to be the guardians and the 
 transmitters of the truths which He revealed to 
 them, and of the laws which He gave into their 
 custody. They were charged afterwards to de- 
 liver the same to others whom they should select, 
 " Eph. iv. 8, 11, 12. 
 
128 THE SPIRIT OF ANTICHRIST. 
 
 whom they, in turn, should illuminate and train 
 to the same likeness, thereby transmitting to the 
 end of the world, undiminished, the custody of 
 Divine truth which was delivered to their charge. 
 This, then, is the priesthood ; and there is no doubt 
 that it must be an object of special animosity ; 
 and for the very reason with which I began : ' If 
 the world hate you, know ye that it hath hated Me 
 before you.' This was said to the first priests. 
 ' If you had been of the world, the world would 
 love its own ; but because you are not of the world, 
 but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore 
 the world hateth you.'^^ They are witnesses of 
 the truth, and they have power to deliver it ; 
 and they have power to deliver it, because they 
 have a Divine certainty of the truth they de- 
 liver ; and they have a Divine certainty of that 
 truth, because they are the disciples of the 
 Church which is divinely guided, before they be- 
 come the teachers of the faithful. To them is com- 
 mitted the power of applying that truth to men 
 — tliat is, of guiding their thoughts and consci- 
 ences, and of distinguishing truth from falsehood 
 in matters of faith, of judging the actions of men, 
 
 i« St. John XT. 18, 19. 
 
THE SPIRIT OP ANTICHRIST. 129 
 
 of distinguishing between right and wrong in ques- 
 tions of the Divine law, and of pronouncing upon 
 them censure, if need be ; giving or withholding 
 absolution bv their sentence before God. I do not 
 wonder, therefore, that there should be an ani- 
 mosity in those that do not love the Master, from 
 whose side the priesthood springs; and I do not 
 wonder that a bad priest — if he can be found — is 
 the hero and the saint of the world. And it never 
 happens that an unliappy priest, either by loss of 
 faith or by loss of fidelity, falls from his sacred 
 state, but he is straightway glorified as a theolo- 
 gian, preacher, doctor, and I know not what be- 
 sides. The world receives him as its own, and 
 because he is its own, loves him. 
 
 5. Lastly, there is one person npon whom this 
 Antichristian spirit concentrates itself, ad the 
 lightning on the conductor. There is one person 
 upon earth who is the pinnacle of the temple, which 
 is always the first to be struck. It is the Vicar of 
 Jesus Christ ; and that for the most obvious of rea- 
 sons. There is no man on earth so near to Jesus 
 Christ as His own Vicar. Two hundred and fifty- 
 seven links, and we arrive at the Person of the 
 Son of God. Two hundred and fifty-seven Pon- 
 
 K. 
 
130 THE SPIRIT OF ANTICHRIST. 
 
 tiffs,.anfl we are in the presence of the Master whom 
 His Vicar represents. That chain runs through 
 the ages of Christian history, and connects us with 
 the day when, on the coasts of DecapoKs, Jesus 
 said to Peter, ' Thou art Peter, and upon this rock 
 I will build My Church, and the gates of hell shall 
 not prevail against it.' No man therefore brings 
 us so near to the Person of the Son of God as His 
 Vicar upon earth, and no man is to be made so 
 like to Him in suffering for His sake. The &st 
 nine-and-twenty Pontiffs were crowned with mar- 
 tyrdom. Five-and-forty times, since then, the 
 Pontiffs have either been driven out of Rome by 
 violence, or by violence have been hindered from 
 setting their foot in it. Their lives have been 
 lives of wandering, like those the Apostle de- 
 scribes in the Epistle to the Hebrews : ' Of whom 
 the world was not worthy ; wandering in deserts, 
 in mountains, and in dens, and in caves of the 
 earth.'^' Their whole life has been a life of the 
 Cross, and that because they bear the ofSce, and 
 stand in the place, of their Divine Master. The 
 ^Evangelists write of Jesus, and those that were 
 A^ith Him ; as in the Book of Acts it is Peter, and 
 " Heb. xi. 38. 
 
THE SPIRIT OF ANTICHRIST. 131 
 
 those that were with him. He had taken his Mas- 
 ter's place. And to Peter were given the two 
 great prerogatives which constituted the plenitude 
 of his Master's office. To him first, and to him 
 alone, before all the others, though in the presence 
 of the others, was given the power of the keys. 
 To him, and to him alone, and in the presence of 
 the others, was given also the charge of the uni- 
 versal flock : ' Feed My sheep.' To him, and to 
 him alone, exclusively, were spoken the words, 
 ' Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to 
 have you, that he might sift you as wheat' (that 
 is, all the Apostles) ; ' but I have prayed for thee' 
 — in the singular number: for thee, Peter — 'that 
 thy faith fail not ; and thou being once converted, 
 confirm thy brethren ;'^* and therefore the pleni- 
 tude of jurisdiction, and the plenitude of truth, 
 with the promise of Divine assistance to preserve 
 him in that truth, was given to Peter, and in Peter 
 to his successors. 
 
 Compare together Rome and Constantinople. 
 
 Kome, at all times assailed by a warfare so 
 
 manifold that the world has hurled upon it 
 
 every weapon that man could forge or direct; 
 
 " St. Luke xxii. 31, 32. 
 
132 THE SPIRIT OF ANTICHRIST. 
 
 Constantinople, under imperial protection, fostered 
 and endowed, sank into schism, and is in bondage 
 to the false prophet. Rome sidferiug, but free ; free 
 and royal ; royal and reigning over the Christian 
 world. Make another contrast. Poor Ireland, 
 with its unbroken tradition of immaculate Catholic 
 Faith. Poor Ireland — what preserved it three 
 hundred years ago, and during three hundred 
 years of suffering for the Faith 1 Fidelity to the 
 Vicar of Jesus Christ, fidelity to Rome, fidelity to 
 the changeless See of Peter. The arch of the Faith 
 is kept fast by that keystone, which the world 
 Avould fain strike out if it could, but never has pre- 
 vailed to do so ; and Ireland has been sustamed 
 by it : and to this day among the nations of the 
 Christian world there is not to be found a people 
 so instinct with faith and so governed by Chris- 
 tian morality as the people of Ireland. Driven 
 abroad into all the nations of the world, into the 
 colonies of the British Empire, into the great 
 northern continent of America — wheresoever they 
 go they carry with them their faith, and sow it 
 broadcast in works of a magnitude and generosity 
 which we here, in the midst of all our wealth, can- 
 not attempt to imitate. Compare with poor Ire- 
 
THE SPIRIT OF ANTICHRIST. 133 
 
 land imperial and prosperous England. The pic- 
 ture would be too sad; and, as I have said before, I 
 refrain from all that could needlessly wound any that 
 are not of my flock. You know the past divisions 
 and estrangements, the animosities which, I hope, 
 are now slackened, the contentions which, 1 trust, 
 are now at an end. But what a history has been 
 the religious history of England for the last three 
 hundred years ! What is its religious state now ? 
 What will be its future I The majestic cathedrals 
 of England, the noble abbeys, the churches of ten 
 thousand parishes, the lofty structures of om- an- 
 cient towns, the sweeter, if humbler, churches in 
 our green hamlets, and in our woodlands, and on 
 our solitary downs show that Faith had pene- 
 trated everywhere through the English people, and 
 that the people were profoundly Christian. I have 
 been reading lately the books of piety written 
 here in England some two hundred years be- 
 fore what men call the Reformation, in which, 
 if the tracing of the Spirit of God in the hu- 
 man heart, transcribing itself upon the page, can 
 anywhere be found, it is in the revelations of Di- 
 vine love and the interior consciousness of the soul 
 which are left to us by our ancestors. Are Eng- 
 
1 34 THE SPIRIT OF ANTICHRIST. 
 
 lishmen never any more to return to the unity of 
 the Faith"? Are we never again to worship at 
 one altar? Are Englishmen to be united in every- 
 thing but faith, and in faith to be for ever 
 divided 1 God forbid ! I rejoice to know that the 
 English people believe profoundly in God ; that, 
 as yet, the plague of Atheism has not made its 
 havoc amongst them. They believe, too, in Chris- 
 tianity as a Divine revelation, and therefore they 
 believe in Jesus Christ their Saviour; and 'no 
 man can say, the Lord Jesus, but by the Holy 
 Ghost,'^' and ' every spirit which confesses that 
 Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, is of God. '^^ They 
 believe, too, that Holy Scripture is the written 
 word of God. It is true, there are to be found 
 here and there rationalists and critics and sceptics 
 and shallow heads, who may have rejected the 
 written word of God : but these are not the English 
 people. They hold it fast as their birthright. I 
 rejoice to know it. Ay, more than this ; they have 
 declared themselves in these last years, and will all 
 the more inflexibly declare themselves, to be Chris- 
 tians, being sharply warned and taught by what is 
 now before our eyes. They will demand that their 
 '» 1 Cor. xii. 3. «» 1 St. John iv. 2. 
 
THE SPIRIT OF ANTICHRIST. 135 
 
 children too shall be brought up as Christians. I 
 rejoice to know all this. May God strengthen 
 those things that remain ! May He preserve them 
 where they exist, and revive them where they are 
 declining ! May He once more unite what is 
 divided, in the charity of truth ! 
 
 Let us now sum up what has been said of the 
 four great evils of the day. First, we have seen that 
 one great evil of this day is the revolt of the intel- 
 lect from God. I pointed out to you how that revolt 
 manifested itself in Atheism, in Deism, in heresy, in 
 the diminishing and explaining away of Christian 
 doctrine, and in practical unbelief. Secondly, I 
 showed you the revolt of the will from the law 
 of God. I traced it out in the lawlessness which 
 is characteristic of these later days, in the world- 
 worship which is a moral apostasy from God, in 
 the luxury which is eating out the heart of morals, 
 in the sensuous piety which paralyses and taints 
 even the devout, and in the softness and self-in- 
 dulgence which makes us unworthy of the Cross. 
 Thirdly, I endeavoured to sketch out the revolt 
 of society from the authority of God. I pointed 
 out that civil society is a Divine creation in the 
 order of nature ; that God elevated and conse- 
 
1 36 THE SPIRIT OF ANTICHRIST. 
 
 prated the order of nature and of politics by in- 
 stituting His Church in the world, and by uniting 
 the authority of civil government with the Chris- 
 tian authority of the Church. I traced out also 
 the rebellion, the divorce, the separation, which 
 has taken place between these two divine crea- 
 tions — the State, as it is called, and the Church — • 
 and as a consequence, the desecration of the civil 
 power, the stripping of the civil society of the 
 world of its Christian character, and the reducing 
 it once more to the mere state of nature. In 
 those ages when society was Christian, the public 
 opinion, public laws, public axion:is, the influence 
 all around, sustained the individual, raised him 
 upwards, and supported him in his higher life. 
 Now it is society that drags the individual down ; 
 Christianity lingers in individuals, but it has 
 departed from society. And, lastly, I have en- 
 deavoured to draw out what the Antichristian 
 spirit is. It is the spirit of the world, which has 
 separated itself altogether from the Church and 
 from Christianity, or retains only a fragmentary 
 Christianity, and is, sometimes consciously, some- 
 times unconsciously, penetrated by the Antichris- 
 tian enmity. I have marked also the special 
 
THE SPIRIT OF ANTICHRIST. 137 
 
 objects against which this spirit directs itself: Re- 
 velation, the Catholic and Roman Church, the life 
 of perfection, the priesthood, and the Vicar of 
 Jesus Christ. 
 
 The general conclusion from all that I have 
 said is this : there is no hope for man or for 
 society but in returning to God. There is no 
 other hope. There is nothing but God on which 
 the soul can rest, on which society can stand. 
 The most perfect legislation, the most refined 
 human laws, the most acute human philosophy, 
 political economy, benevolence, and beneficence in 
 all its forms, all the social sciences of which we 
 hear so much — all these are powerless without 
 God. The most finished time-piece, in which every 
 minute articulation is complete and perfect, can- 
 not strike one note or measure one moment unless 
 a living hand commimicate to it the fund of mo- 
 tion which it afterwards exhausts. The mightiest 
 machine which will lift a hammer of surpassing 
 weight, break bars of iron, or cut them as if they 
 were the branches of the fu-tree, the most won- 
 derful structures of mechanical skUl, are nothing 
 until the momentum is given, and that momentum 
 must be souglit elsewhere. Mechanics can do no- 
 
138 THE SPIEIT OF ANTICHRIST. 
 
 thing witliout dynamical powers ; and these dy- 
 namical powers, for men and for society, are to be 
 found in God alone. They can be found only in 
 Him to whose image man is made; they can be 
 found nowhere but in His truth, which is the key 
 of the human intellect, and in His grace, which is 
 the only hand that can touch the heart in man ; 
 and if this be so, they can be found only in Chris- 
 tianity. Neither adults nor children can be touched 
 by the laws of states, except externally. The state 
 may control the external actions of men — it can 
 imprison, it can fine, it can inflict capital punish- 
 ment ; but it cannot convert the sinner, nor change 
 the will, nor illuminate the intellect, nor guide the 
 conscience, nor shape a character. It cannot edu- 
 cate a child. All this is internal, not external ; it 
 is not mechanism ; it belongs to the living powers 
 of the soul; and God alone, by truth and grace, 
 can accomplish this work in man. 
 
 I implore you, in God's name, and all the more 
 because of the events, full of sorrow and of shame to 
 Christian men, which have crowded so thick upon 
 us in these last months, I may say in this last 
 week, that, with all your heart and will, and all 
 the weight of your soul, you cast yourselves on 
 
THE SPIRIT OF AXTICIIRIST. 139 
 
 God. He alone can save. Use all your influence 
 ■with those around you, in your homes, your house- 
 holds, your friendships ; and if you have public 
 influence, public trust, public authority, strive that 
 all who bear responsibility shall cast themselves 
 on God, as the only hope for society and for the 
 people. Do you want to see what man without 
 God can do ? Read the history of the last eighty 
 years in Paris. You have there one simple phe- 
 nomenon — generation rising after generation with- 
 out God in the world. And why ? Because with- 
 out Christian education. First, an atheistical re- 
 volution ; next, an empire penetrated through 
 and through with a mocking philosophy and a 
 reckless indifferentism ; afterwards came Govern- 
 ments, changed in name and in form, but not 
 in practice nor in spirit. The Church, trammelled 
 by protection, its spiritual action faint and para- 
 lysed, could not penetrate the masses of the peo- 
 ple, nor form the rising youth. It laboured fer- 
 vently; its sons fought nobly for Christian 
 freedom; thousands were saved; but for eighty 
 years the mass of men has grown up without God 
 and without Christ in the world. My whole soul 
 pities them. These outbursts of horror, strife, out- 
 
140 THE SPIRIT OF ANTICHRIST. 
 
 rage, sacrilege, bloodshed, are the harvest reaped 
 from the rank soil in which such seed was cast. 
 All this is true. But how did souls created to the 
 image of God grow up in such a state I They 
 were robbed : robbed before they were born, robbed 
 of their inheritance, and reared up in an education 
 without Christianity. Let this be a warning to 
 cm-selves. We are on the turn of the tide. A 
 few active, busy, confident, and eloquent men 
 were a year ago carrying us away with theories 
 of state education without religion. We were 
 told that a child might be taught to read and to 
 write and to spell and to sum without Christian- 
 ity. Who denies it? But what does this mate 
 of them 1 To what would they grow up "? The 
 formation of the will and heart and character, the 
 formation of a man, is education, and not the 
 reading and the writing and the spelling and the 
 summing. For fifteen hundred years. Christians 
 served God and loved man, before as yet they re- 
 ceived this cultivation ; and we, because we have 
 it profusely, we are forgetting the deeper and 
 diviner lessons. The tradition of Christian edu- 
 cation in England is as yet unbroken. It is threat- 
 ened now for the first time. In God's name, stand 
 
THE SPIRIT OF ANTICHRIST. 141 
 
 fast, and save it. I can add no more. Do not be 
 afraid, if you find yourselves in the minority. 
 ' Wo to you when men shall bless you !'^^ You 
 must be censured if you are the disciples of 
 Jesus Christ. The world that hated Him will 
 not love you. ' The disciple is not above his master, 
 nor the servant above his lord. It is enough 
 for the disciple that he be as his master, and the 
 servant as his lord.'^^ ' If they have called the 
 master of the house Beelzebub, how much more 
 them of his household V And therefore, if you 
 have the mark of the world's hatred upon you, 
 accept it; press it to your bosom. It is the 
 token that you are the disciples of the true and 
 only Master. If you have the world's favour and 
 sunshine, look to yourselves. There is a dark fu- 
 ture before the world. What it may be, God 
 alone knows. The Church will have to suffer ; 
 but there is a light upon it, and that light can 
 never fade. We are in evil times, marked deeply 
 by the four great evils of which I have spoken. 
 Around us are ' evil men and seducers, who grow 
 worse and worse, erring, and driving into error.'^* 
 ' Many shall come in My name,' our Lord has said, 
 " St. Luke Ti. 26. « St. Matt. x. 24, 25. " 2 Tim. iu. 14. 
 
142 THE SPIRIT OP ANTICHRIST. 
 
 ' and seduce many ;' and because of theii* iniquity 
 the love and the charity of the many shall wax 
 cold. Nation shall rise against nation, and king- 
 dom against kingdom; and there shall be wars 
 and pestilences in many places. But the end is 
 not yet. This is only the beginning of troubles. 
 Keep close to the footsteps of the Master who 
 spoke those words ; and, when these signs are in 
 the sky and upon the earth, remember that He 
 also said, ' When these things begin to come to 
 pass, look up, and lift up your heads; for your 
 redemption is at hand.'^* 
 
 « St. Luke xxi. 23. 
 
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