LIGHTS AND SHADOWS
It would be idle to deny or to palliate the many shadows that fall across the history of Catholicism in the century that has elapsed. I scarcely need refer to the weaknesses and errors of her individual children: such acts she repudiates, and when she can chastises remedially. But the Church has not recovered that vast inherited moral power over the public life which it enjoyed before the French Revolution. In many ways the consequences of atheism, materialism, and even of deism, have been deduced into manners and institutions, to the detriment of the ancient Christian morality. The sterner Christian virtue of previous centuries, founded on the Christian revelation, has been forced out of the public life of whole peoples. Expediency, opportunism, moral cowardice have often triumphed over the plain right and the fair truth. The principle has been established that God is on the side of the great battalions, is ever with the strong men of blood and iron. Ancient and venerable sovereignties have been hypocritically dispossessed. Small nationalities have been erased from the world’s political map, and the history of the near past almost justifies the rumors of impending steps in the same direction. With the increase of greatness in states comes an increase of warlike perils, not only from commercial rivalry, but from that root of ambition and domination which grows in every heart, unless checked and subdued in time, and which in the past has been too often the source of violent injustice on the greatest scale.
These deeds and principles we believe to be a necessary result of naturalism, of the exclusion of the supernatural and revealed elements of Christianity from our public life, and not only these, but others of a graver character, that must one day follow from their logical and unchecked evolution. Divorce, a cause of ruin in every land, grows with rapidity in many civilized nations, so much so that not only Catholicism, its inveterate enemy, is shocked, but Christian men of every persuasion believe that some public and authoritative steps ought to be taken to prevent the pollution of the family life, that fixed and natural source of public morality. Religion has been officially thrust out of the systems of education, in every grade, and the young mind taught that it is quite a private and unimportant thing. Thus, under the plea of indifference, many States have practically made themselves the champions of that agnosticism which is the arch-enemy not only of religion, but also of patriotism from time immemorial connected with religion. The average man soon ceases to make great sacrifices, above all to die for the public good, when he is satisfied that there is no other life, or that it is not worth while living for the uncertainties of approval and reward by an eternal God, who is just and true and holy.