The War Upon Religion / Being an Account of the Rise and Progress of Anti-Christianism in Europe

by Francis A. Cunningham

To what frightful deserts must the writers of modern literature look forward in accordance with such a prediction! The literature of today, light and popular, stately and philosophical alike, teems with immorality and infidelity. It displays itself in every form of poetry and prose, in lectures, essays, histories, and in biblical criticism. There it stands palpable and terrible, like Milton's Death, black and horrible, obstructing the light of heaven, and overshadowing God's fair creation. The press is a Catholic institution: a Catholic invented it; a Catholic first printed books, and the Catholic Church first fostered it. But the enemies of Catholicity have seized it and turned it into an engine of destruction to faith and morals.

The newspapers in most cases teem with scandals which absorb the thoughts or arouse the passions. Such reading familiarizes the young with the details of vice, and their better nature is overshadowed by the vicious existences pictured, while the moral strength to resist temptation is slowly but surely weakened.

Then there is that inward strife and struggle—that warring of the passions from which no one is free—that tendency to evil which seeks to cast off the salutary restraints of religion, and which has carried down with the current of innate corruption the greater part of mankind. All these things are borne in upon the soul, day by day, and year by year, as though life were to last forever, until the unhappy reader begins to abandon the absolute realities of life and law and to dwell in the house of a diseased imagination like a leper waiting for the moment of final dissolution.

What we want thus today is an arousing of the Catholic conscience in this regard, the cultivation of Catholic instincts, and the acquiring of Catholic habits of thought. While the banners of atheism and anarchy are waving throughout Europe, the forces of infidelity and indifference are doing their deadly work at home. The spirit of revolt, born of corruption and bred of disease, has swept across the ocean and finds a resting place nearer home. The enemy has laid hold of a great part of the Press and is using it for the destruction of morality and the perversion of truth. The wells of knowledge and the fountains of truth are being daily and hourly poisoned by means of the current literature. A spiritual pestilence is passing over the earth, and the souls of millions are perishing through its foul agencies.

If God, therefore, has given to Catholics wealth of ability and strength of mind, and richness of opportunity to engage in the intellectual combat which is being fought everywhere around us, they ought to use these means to oppose the tide of infidelity and indifference which is sweeping over the nations by putting against it the barrier of good books and Catholic reading. In many quarters the mists are beginning to lift; many intelligent people are beginning to look to the Catholic Church because of her openly proclaimed doctrines, her magnificent works in building up the mighty fabric of the social world, and her lofty ideals of humanity. Secularism in education is confessing its failure at home and abroad.

The toiling masses are turning to the Church for the solution of the vexed problems of labor. The creeds are falling to pieces for want of unity, cohesive principle and authority. Thousands are flocking back to the old Church in sheer weariness of spirit. The thousands would swell into millions if we were up and active in the dissemination of good books, and did our part in helping on the cause of Catholic literature. The Catholic book, the Catholic magazine, the Catholic newspaper is the fiery cross spread from hand to hand, to light up the darkness and to kindle the faith of the multitudes.

SOCIALISM.

One of the forces that make most of contemporary conditions is that of Socialism.

Modern Socialism originated in a group of uncompromising materialists. Marx was one of the young men who revolted from the extravagant Idealism of Hegel, into the crassest Materialism, along with such men as Feuerbach, Bruno, Bauer and Engel. His theory of the universe reduces it to matter and force, and that of duty to the pursuit of pleasure in its material forms. The man's life was better than his creed, for there were some heroic sacrifices in it, for the good of the cause. But his theory neither called for nor sanctioned any such sacrifices. They were due to the pervading atmosphere of an imperfectly Christian civilization, with its ideals of pity and sympathy. They could not find their roots in a materialist view of the process of human history, which is but the tale of "conflict of existence and survival of the fittest," not much above the wrangling of wild beasts in the forests.

While it is only the errors of Socialism that meet with opposition from sound minds—the good points not being identified with the system except by accident—there are some of its errors that are fundamental and therefore deserve a larger exposure than the rest.