Wealth can be deprived of its satiety, poverty of its sting, labor of its pain, ease of its slothfulness, learning of its pride, power of its arrogance, ignorance of its stupidity.
But though we expect no natural Utopia or earthly paradise, we are no less bound to oppose and correct vices, sorrows, evils, dangers, and oppressions, as they spring, ever fierce and relentless, with their countless heads, whether personal, social, national, or legislative.
The Catholic armed with his vote becomes the champion of faith, law, order, social and political morality, and Christian civilization, no less—in fact, a greater degree, for our present enemies are more dangerous—than his ancestor who hung a wallet over his leathern jerkin, and, shouldering his halberd, followed the lord of the manor to Palestine; than he who aided the Catholic Ferdinand and Isabella to drive the Moor from the soil of Christian Spain, or, under John Sobieski, rolled back the tide of Mohammedan invasion from the European shores of the Mediterranean.
He goes forth furnished with this weapon, which, faithfully and honorably employed, must become invincible, arrest the swollen current of corruption, crime, and lawlessness which threatens to sweep away religion, morality, and liberty, insure the preëminence of law, order, and republican institutions, preserve and perfect the results of material and natural science, put an end to poverty in its abject and hopeless forms, and banish suffering from unrelieved want, and develop and complete a system of jurisprudence which shall sustain what the world has not yet seen, a pure republic of equal rights, exact justice, and assured temporal prosperity, presided over, influenced, and informed by true religion.
The great and undeniably wonderful and valuable fruits of human genius and materialistic science, may be utilized to meet the ends of ideal justice, and true individual and national prosperity and happiness.
With the means of instant intelligent communication and rapid transportation, it is not an impossibility to hope that the head of the church may again become the acknowledged head of the reunited family of Christian nations; the arbiter and judge between princes and peoples, between government and government, the exponent of the supreme justice and highest law, in all important questions affecting the rights, the interests, and the welfare of communities and individuals.
Under such a system, force would give place to reason; the nations would learn war no more, and a general disarmament could be safely imposed. The door of the temple of the demon god of war, which has stood open since Cain imbrued his fratricidal hands in the blood of Abel, would be closed for ever.
"Yea, truth and justice then,
Will down return to men,
Orbed in a rainbow; and, like glories wearing,
Mercy will sit between,
Throned in celestial sheen,
With radiant feet the tissued clouds down-steering,
And heaven, as at some festival,
Will open wide the gates of her high palace hall."
Although we are far from expecting a result grand, glorious, and wonderful, realizing in the highest degree the promise made to the human race if faithful to the object of their creation, still we do not hesitate to assert that it is within the power of the ballot, wielded by Catholic hands and directed by Catholic conscience, to accomplish as much and more.
It is no more than the church has a right to expect from her subjects; it is no more than they owe her and themselves; it would be a triumph worthy of the nineteenth century, and worthy of a fallen race deemed worthy to be redeemed by the blood of a God.