It was a vague and abstract school. It took its very name from the fancy that this new knowledge transcended all experience and was quite independent of reason, authority, the testimony of the senses, or the testimony of mankind. It spoke freely of the Infinite, the Infinite Nothing, the Infinite Essence of Things. Carlyle spoke of Eternal Verities, the Immensities, the Eternal Silences. Emerson wrote of it as the Over-soul, the Spirit of the Universe. It permeated all literature, it directed the study of history, it inspired poetry, it became a religious creed; it hypnotized a large portion of the studious world.
About the middle of the century men began to question it, especially when it was perceived that its conclusions did not correspond with its premises. Human thought suddenly veered to the opposite extreme. The world was tired of abstractions; it called for facts. Thenceforth reason was to be omnipotent, and Nature began to be studied. The philosophy of the new order made her a god. "She will give up her secrets to us, and we will build our systems upon them. We will tear open the bowels of the mountains, and read their signs. We will pull down the stars from the skies, weigh them, and test their constituents. We will seek the elemental forces of Nature, and there we shall find the elemental truths. We will dredge the seas, sweep the rivers, drag fossils out of forgotten caves, construct the forms of dead leviathans from one bone, examine the dust of stars in shattered aerolites, and the structure of the animal creation in the spawn of frogs by the wayside, or the tadpoles in the month of May. And we shall find that all things are made for man; and that man alone is the Omnipotent and Divine." The world took up the cry and called it Progress. Mankind was shaken by new emotions. Through steamship, telegraph, telephone, and wave currents, distance was annihilated. The world was moved from its solid basis. Vast buildings were flung into the sky; the populations flocked to fill them in the dense cities; and in the exultation of the moment men looked back upon the past with a kind of pitying ridicule, and cried: "This is our earth, our world; we want no other. Humanity is our God, and the earth its throne!"
Then in the very height of all this pride, men suddenly discovered that under all this huge mechanism and masonry they had actually driven out the soul of man. The building of sky-scrapers, the slaughter of so many millions of hogs, the stretching of wiry networks over cities and states, the underground railways and sea-tunnels—all these were but a poor substitute or compensation for the ideals that were lost. Beneath all this material splendor every noble quality that distinguishes man was utterly extinguished, and one saw only the horrors of the midnight streets, the masses festering in city slums, the great gulf broadening between the rich and the poor, selfishness, greed, Mammon-worship, the extinction of the weak, the sovereignty of the strong, the cruelty, the brutality, the latent meanness of the human heart developing day by day like a monstrous disease upon the face of humanity.
Then came the mutterings of a new terror, the very offspring of the materialism that was worshiped, the spectre of socialism and anarchy, the new belief in the terrible destructiveness of a Godless science. The intellectual world drew back in horror at the sight of the child it had begotten. It began to repudiate the transcendentalism that made pantheism, and the empiricism which made Nature a god, and now it strives to justify itself by a futile attempt to reconcile God with human fancy. Its new religions are but the sugaring of the pill that a docile humanity must swallow. The vagueness of transcendentalism is united with the materialism of nature worship, and the resulting equation is pessimism. Charity, kindness, love, the smile of friendship and the laughter of innocence, all must vanish into the black night of despair before the mandate of a Moloch who has eaten the heart and smothered the thinking soul. It is the moment of crisis, when the world is beginning to look for a savior; and out of the darkness only one source of hope is seen glowing with eternal fire, one shelter for poor persecuted, over-ridden, oppressed humanity—the mother of order and happiness, the protectress of the home, the warmth of the heart, the life of the soul—the mistress of all true philosophy—the old, the never changing Church.
SATANISM.
In following up the various assaults made by the Gates of Hell upon the Church established by Christ, one is struck by the absolute method and order they betray. There is a mind behind them all, and that mind has been working vigorously for nineteen centuries. Arianism, Manicheeism, the paganism of the sixteenth century, Protestantism, all were conceived along religious lines, and the thought of God was ever their central proposition. With the French Revolution, born of Deism in England and Rationalism in Germany, there came into view the spirit of Paganism, which has set itself against Christianity for over a hundred years. Even Paganism, with its aping of the ancients and its depreciation of Christian doctrine and morality, has yielded before the human craving for spirituality, and is falling to pieces rapidly. But the Gates of Hell never grow weary, and the mind that in past ages could trouble the peace of the Church rises to a new effort, an effort that, with strange fatuity, it dreams will be final. Arianism, Protestantism, Paganism failing, the new religion of degeneration takes on a darker, a more repellent aspect. It no longer hides behind religious phrases, but comes out into the open, and those who can read its character have called it Satanism.
Under the guise of Modernism it strove to plant its poisonous weeds even in the vestibule of the Church, but, exposed through the vigilance of our great Pontiff, it made use of the Protestant churches to propagate its errors, until in many pulpits the authority of Jesus is as much a stranger as if Christ had never been born. Out of this chaos came the strange philosophy of Charles W. Eliot with its use of Christian phrases and its negation of the Christian religion. Eliot's nonsense, however, was but a stepping stone whereby the last assault might be made upon the Church. The plans of this assault have been developing for years in many universities of the country, in the yellow press, and in many organizations of men who have grown weary of law and seek in absolute license the gratification of animalism. Satanism is thus the danger of the day.
After many exemplifications of the creed of Satanism in the matters of divorce, abortion, race suicide, white slavery, not to speak of burnings at the stake and the thousand and one horrible crimes that a "wicked and adulterous generation" perpetrates in the open light of day, the world was prepared to hear its praises sung from the rostrum of one of America's largest educational establishments.
One evening last year an eminent professor, speaking in one of our largest universities, formulated some of its tenets, the horror of which, let us hope, will shock even the most depraved of minds. In Satanism charity shall be no more; that spirit of love which made life tolerable, which brought the smile to the face of poverty and suffering, which, born of Divine love, spreads its wings over the darkness of earth and creates faith in better things and hope of higher destinies—that charity shall have no place in the creed of these men, no more than it shall have place in that land of eternal despair whence first that creed came forth. More satanic still, the hand of this new religionist is red with the blood of the helpless, the infant whose feeble wailings wring the heart of a human mother, the blood of the infirm whose hollow cheek bespeaks the pity of the more fortunate, or whose halting step awakens the manhood of the young and noble, the blood of the aged who have given the years of their lives to the cause of humanity. To Satanism all these, to whom Christ had said, "Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy burdened, and I will refresh you," are obstacles, in the pathway of conquest to the Gates of Hell. This Satanism gives as its excuse the cause of economy as against humanitarianism, as if Divine Providence during the many centuries that have passed has not fully demonstrated Its ability to care for the world, to prevent by natural means the danger of over-population to keep the balance in human affairs as wonderfully as It has in the circling of the stars in the firmament.
One notes these various assaults not with any sense of fear for the Church to which Christ has promised His assisting presence, until the end of time, but as signs of the times, as warnings to those who thoughtlessly are led into the toils, to those who for a little temporary gain would deliver up the souls of their children that they may drink the doctrines of Satanism and lie down in pleasant places to die of its noxious poison.