The Catholic World, Vol. 25, April 1877 to September 1877

The Catholic World.
A Monthly Magazine Of General Literature And Science
Vol. XXV.
April, 1877, To September, 1877.
New York:
The Catholic Publication Society Company,
9 Barclay Street.
1877.
POETRY.
NEW PUBLICATIONS.
When the Almighty introduced the children of Israel into the Promised Land he enjoined the utter extirpation of the heathen races, and the destruction of all belonging to them. But the tribes grew weary of war; they spared, and their subsequent history shows us the result. The Chanaanites became in time the conquerors and made the Hebrews their subjects politically and in religion. The paganism learned on the banks of the Nile had become but a faint reminiscence in the minds of the descendants of those who marched out under Moses and Aaron; but the worship of Baal and of Moloch and of Astaroth overran the land. A long series of disasters ending with the overthrow of their national existence, and a seventy years’ captivity, were required to purge the Hebrew mind of the poison imbibed from the heathen remnant. Then all the power of the Alexandrian sovereigns failed to compel them to worship the gods of Greece. Omnes dii gentium dæmonia is a statement, clear, plain, and definite, that we Catholics cannot refuse to accept. Modern indifferentism may regard all the pagan worships as expressions of truth, and the worship of their deities as something merely symbolical of the operations of nature, not the actual rendering of divine honors. But to us there can be no such theory. The worship was real and the objects were demons, blinding and misleading men through their passions and ignorance. The very vitality of paganism in regaining lost ground, and in rising against the truth, shows its satanic character.
The experience of the Jewish people is reproduced elsewhere. When Christianity, beginning the conquest of Europe with Greece and Italy, closed its victorious career by reducing to the cross the Scandinavians and the German tribes of Prussia, later even than the conversion of the Tartaric Russians, there was left in all lands a pagan element, on which the arch-enemy based his new schemes of revolt and war upon the truth. We of the Gentiles, whether from the sunny south or the colder north, bear to this day, in our terms for the divisions of the week and year, the names of the deities whom our heathen ancestors worshipped—the demons who blinded them to the truth. The Italian, Frenchman, and Spaniard thus keep alive the memory of Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, Venus, and Saturn; the German and Scandinavian tribes of Tuisco, Woden, Thor, Freya, and Sator. Janus opens the year, followed by Februata, Juno, and Mars; Maia claims a month we dedicate to Mary, and which the Irish in his own language still calls the Fire of Baal—Baal-tinne.