As to Brother Bidegain, the traitor, he was at Salonica when last heard of. His sudden death there was announced; but I think the rumour is false. It would be very imprudent, coming so soon after the other. But he will have to make his peace with the G. O. or beware. He cannot be prosecuted for stealing these documents, as they represent no monetary value, and, moreover, the Grand Orient has no legal existence or civil personality. They are said to have millions of main morte, but they simply ignore the Associations Bill.
In conclusion, I hope it will be understood that I do not accuse many honest Freemasons of England and the United States of being particeps criminis in all or any of the doings of the Grand Orient, Carbonari, Mafia, Cimorra, Senuisi, or the secret societies of Islam or in China.
Freemasonry assumes different aspects in different circumstances, but it is the eternal enemy of militant organized Christianity. It does not trouble itself with Christianity “divided into many rivulets,” and consequently harmless, according to the saying of Lord Shaftesbury, who was of opinion that “England was the country in which Christianity did the least harm because it was divided into so many rivulets.”
The Catholic Church alone is an enemy worthy of its steel, and wherever these two foes meet there must be war—latent or overt.
This war is on in France, and must be fought to the finish.
PART SECOND
October, 1904.
M. COMBES, who proclaimed at the Chambers two years ago that he had taken office only to wage war on Clericalism, enumerated his deeds of prowess recently in a political speech at Auxerre. Fifteen thousand scholar establishments, strongholds of the ghostly enemy, had been demolished! “Gentlemen, you will grant that this is a great deal for a ministry obliged to fight at every instant for its own existence,” he exclaimed.
We are now coming to the second part of the Jacobin programme. As I wrote last year in the Evening Post (June 27th), the true object of the Revolution in 1790, as to-day, is the destruction of Christianity and its offspring, Liberty, in order to establish on the ruins of both, the reign of the Omnipotent Infallible State, before which all must fall down and worship or disappear. To-day the State is M. Combes and his “bloc,” a very poor avatar of the Titanic Corsican who measured himself with all Europe. There was but one force that resisted him, and against this obstacle M. Combes stumbled when he demanded, peremptorily, that the Vatican withdraw letters addressed to two bishops needing to be disciplined. The Holy See was acting in the plenitude of its spiritual jurisdiction. M. Combes curtly demanded that Pius X send in his resignation, as “the political system of the Republic consists in the subordination of all institutions, whatever they may be, to the supremacy of the State.”
This is the latest phase of a very old struggle which began in the days of the Apostles. In the history of all the nations of antiquity, the problem of Church and State and their correlations existed, and was solved, easily and summarily, by the system proclaimed by M. Combes. The ruler of each nation was the Pontifex Maximus of his realm. This system, with its necessary concomitant of national religions, reached its culminating point in the worship of the “divine Cæsars,” the acme of human servitude.