"Peace here below, I have never known. Rest here below, I have never found. I am always on the march—my banner ever unfurled—my war-cry ever sounding!
"Therefore, in the storm and shock of my battle of to-day with my enemies, my soldier-children fear not. Around my old chieftain they rally. What though some may desert and leave the lines? The lines close up again—and the deserters are not missed. What though a Judas Iscariot may betray? A brave Matthias takes his place. What though a few of craven spirit may flee? The ranks they left are filled by brave men and true.
"From the hill of Calvary to the hill of the Vatican, from Peter before the Council to Pius before the Sardinian, my history has been one long, uninterrupted battle—and my battle one long and glorious victory."
We cannot but smile when we hear infidels talk of the downfall of the Church. What could hell and its agents do more than they have already done for her destruction? They have employed tortures for the body, but they could not reach the spirit; they have tried heresy, or the denial of revealed truth, to such an extent that we cannot see room for any new heresy; they have, by the hand of schism, torn whole countries from the unity of the Church; but what she lost on one side of the globe, she gained tenfold on the other. All these have ignominiously failed to verify the prophecies of hell, that "the Church shall fall."
Look, for instance, at the tremendous effort of the so-called glorious Reformation, together with its twin sister—the unbelief of the nineteenth century. Whole legions of church reformers, together with armies of philosophers armed with negation, and a thousand and one systems of Paganism, rushed on against the Chair of Peter, and swore that the Papacy would fall, and with it the whole Church. Three hundred years are over, and the Catholic Church is still alive, and, to all appearances, more vigorous than ever. The nations have proved that they can get along very well without reformers, but not without the Catholic Church. Men are foolish enough to dream of the destruction of the Papacy. Napoleon tried the game, and, from the summit of his empire, walked into exile, whilst his victim, Pius VII., leaving his prison, entered Rome in triumph. A great statesman of France said, not long ago, that those who tried to swallow the Papacy, and with it the whole Church, always died of indigestion. Let the enemies of the Catholic Church beware! If they dash their heads against this rock, they must not be astonished to find them broken.
And what power has Protestantism to check the National Crime—the murder of helpless innocents? Everybody knows, who knows anything about the subject, that among the Roman Catholic population this crime is hardly known. The reason for the rare occurrence of this crime among Catholics, is their religion. The doctrine of the Catholic Church, her canons, her pontifical constitutions, her theologians, without exception, teach, and always have taught, that even the intention of preventing or destroying human life, at any period from the first instant of conception, is a heinous crime, equal at least in guilt to the crime of murder.
Now as to the power of Protestantism to check this crime, Dr. Storer, the distinguished Protestant physician of Boston, says: "We are compelled to admit that Protestantism has failed to check the increase of criminal abortion." (Criminal Abortion, p. 55.) "There can be no doubt that the Romish ordinance, flanked, on the one hand, by the confessional, and by denouncement and excommunications on the other, has saved to the world thousands of infant lives." (Ibid. p. 74.) "During the ten years which have passed since the preceding sentence was written, we have had ample verification of its truth. Several hundreds of Protestant women have personally acknowledged to us their guilt, against whom only seven Catholics, and of these we found, upon further inquiry, that all but two were only nominally so, not going to the confession."—(Ibid.)
It is, then, not Protestantism, it is the Catholic Church alone that has the power to oppose herself to the propagation of so heinous a crime, and prevent her children from shedding the blood of helpless innocents.
The third great evil which has made the most fearful inroad among us, so as already to have extorted many a warning cry, is the contempt of the marriage tie.
The family, as I have said in a previous chapter, is the groundwork of civil society. If the family be Christian, the State will also be Christian; and if the family be corrupt, the State cannot remain long untarnished. It is the holy sacrament of marriage that gives sanctity to the family, and strength to civil society. To reject that sacrament is to sow the seeds of revolution. Revolution in the family begets revolution in the State. When a government, which, by its very nature, should restrain immorality, allows the separation of man and wife, it sanctions the right of revolution in the family, and sooner or later that government will feel the dire effects of its own corrupt doctrine. Now it is a matter of fact that the contempt of the marriage tie, so prevalent in our country, is owing to Protestantism. If any one wishes to learn how the Continental Reformers regarded the Sacrament of Matrimony, let him read Luther's sermon on Marriage (if he can do so without a blush), or, better still, the dogmatical judgment of Luther, Melanchthon, Bucer, and the rest, giving permission! to the innocent Landgrave of Hesse to commit bigamy, pure and simple.