Then the attempt of the government to destroy the Catholic Church in Germany, by tearing it away from its allegiance to the Pope, and debasing it to a mere function of the state, roused those who might have been disposed to waver, and brought about a universal reawakening of faith. It is the fate of the enemies of God's people to bless when they mean to curse. In fact, when Catholics begin to suffer, they begin to triumph; and hence even those who hate us have of nothing so great horror as of making martyrs and confessors. They know the history of martyrdom—that in the whole earth and in all ages it means victory.
The church, which sprang from the conflict of the God-Man with death, like him, in her greatest humiliation shows forth her highest power.
Her march through the world and through the ages is not along pleasant roads and through peaceful prospects, or, if so, only at times and rarely. If she move in pomp amid the acclamations of peoples, her triumphal procession ends in sorrow. The bark of Peter must be storm-tossed; and when the angry waves would swallow it, the divine voice speaks the magic word, and the quiet deep bears it up on her peaceful bosom.
The road wherein the progress of the church is most secure is the blood-stained way of the cross. When she is all bruised, and there is no comeliness left in her; when her eyes are red with weeping, and the world, beholding her agony, mocks and jeers and laughs her to scorn, then is she strongest; for her strength comes from humility, from suffering, from the cross. When she is humbled, God exalts her; when he permits her enemies to entomb her in ignominy, he is near at hand to crown her with the immortal glory of a new life. The word of Christ is: “You shall live in the world in the midst of persecutions; but take heart: I have conquered the world.”
Within the memory of those who are still young, it was the fashion with our enemies to proclaim that the church was decrepit, that she was dying, that of her own weight she would fall to pieces in the new society that was growing up around her: to-day we hear that she is everywhere waxing too strong, and men appeal against her to tyranny and to brute force.
The most powerful and the most thoroughly organized of the modern nations, the great Cultur-Staat of the age, has confessed that it is unable to check the growth of the church by legitimate means, and it [pg 442] has therefore had recourse to the most arbitrary legislation and to the harshest measures of compulsion and violence. This, of course, is the most explicit avowal of its own impotence. We find also that the two nations which have manifested the most supercilious indifference to the Catholic Church, as being something which did not and could not concern them, now applaud this Prussian tyranny, in spite of the pretence of the love of freedom and fair play. The sympathy of the English press, and to a great extent of the American press, in this struggle, is with the absolute and liberty-destroying government of Prussia. The favorite motto of “civil and religious liberty all the world over” has been wholly lost sight of, and Englishmen and Americans give moral aid to a state which wantonly tramples upon both.
This, too, was a cherished watch-word: The church is the friend of absolutism, the enemy of freedom.
But to-day we behold the Catholic Church, single-handed, fighting again the same battles of liberty which she fought and won in the early centuries of Christianity. Now, as then, she opposes absolutism in the state; denies, as she then denied, that Cæsar can lawfully lay claim to “the things of God”; and protests, in the name of the outraged dignity of human nature, that there is a freedom which transcends the sphere of all earthly authority. Her children, when nothing else remains to be done, utter the divine words: Non possumus—we cannot; we must obey God rather than men.
Referring to this struggle, Bismarck has said, in a memorable speech, that “it is the ancient contest for power, which is as old as the human race itself—the contest for power between king and priest.” This is necessarily the view which he takes, since he believes in nothing but force. But the dualism here is not in the combatants alone; it is in the objects for which they contend.
It is indeed the ancient contest between good and evil, between the spirit and the flesh, between the Christ and the rulers of this world, which makes life a warfare and the earth a battle-field, and which must continue until the end. Never has it been fiercer than in our day, and the battle is yet hardly begun. But very few indeed understand, as yet, the nature of the struggle, or are at all aware of the real principles and interests which are at stake. Few men can see further than an hour or beyond the little circle that bounds their private interests; but each day it is becoming more evident that men must take sides; that not to be for Christ is to be against him.