Michael Muller

“ No doubt, God, in his infinite power and mercy, may enlighten even at the hour of death one who is not yet a Catholic, so that he may know and believe the necessary truths of salvation, be truly sorry for his sins, and die in such disposition of soul as is necessary to be saved. Such a one, by an extraordinary grace of God, ceases to be what he was; he dies united to the Church, and is saved, not as a Protestant, but as a Catholic. But is it wise for a Protestant to expect to be saved by a most extraordinary miracle of the infinite power and mercy of God? ”

“ Ah! how unfortunate is it to be condemned by ourselves, and to have nothing to oppose to the condemnation! And what, indeed, can be opposed when our own conscience is the accuser, witness, and judge? Therefore, it only remains for conscience to assume the character of executioner, and to exercise its vengeance upon us. Dreadful charge, which is more terrible than all the rest! It punishes us. God intrusts the interest of his justice and revenge in the hands of conscience; and in how many ways does it not discharge this dreadful office against the sinner after his sin? ”

“ THE WRITTEN LAW "The laws of nature," says St. Thomas Aquinas, "and all principles of justice and morality, were almost effaced in the time which elapsed between Adam and Moses. At the time of Abraham, all nations had fallen into idolatry. They were plunged into all sorts of vices. Almost all shut their eyes to the light of reason. They were like one who is falling into an abyss. The deeper he falls, the less day-light he sees. God permitted the wicked to fall into this state of universal ignorance and impiety, in order to humble their pride and arrogance. ”

“ In the search after truth, one must find immense difficulties. There is prejudice. It is the effect of early training, of life-long teaching, of reading, and of living in the world. It is the result of almost imperceptible impressions, and yet its force, as an obstacle, is such as in many cases to defy human efforts to remove it. It is like the snow which begins to fall, as the darkness sets in, on roof and road, in little flakes that come down silently all the night, and in the morning the branches bend, and the doors are blocked, and the traffic on road and rail is brought to a standstill. ”

“ God, in establishing his Church from the foundation of the world, in giving his life on the Cross for her, and abiding always with her in her tabernacles unto the consummation of the world, in adorning her as a Bride with all the graces of the Holy Ghost, in denominating her his Beloved, his Spouse, has taught us how he regards her, how deep and tender, how infinite and inexhaustible his love for her, and with what love and honor we should regard her. He loves us with an infinite love, and has died to redeem us; but he loves us and wills our salvation only in and through his Church. ”

“ If we apply those principles to a past transaction, to know whether it was good or bad, our conscience accuses or excuses us."
Conscience, or the sense of right and wrong, which is the first element in religion, is so delicate, so fitful, so easily puzzled, obscured, perverted; so subtle in its argumentative methods, so impressible by education, so biased by pride and passion, so unsteady in its flight, that this sense of right and wrong is at once the highest of all teachers, yet the least clear and luminous in most men. Hence it is that we meet with different kinds of conscience. ”

“ Is it possible that a priest can be so ignorant as to assert what no well instructed Catholic child would assert! Only he who lives in the true faith and in true charity with God has the capacity of making meritorious acts of divine faith. And yet the Rev. A. Young, in his unpardonable ignorance, solemnly asserts that a baptized Protestant, or a baptized Jew, or a baptized Mahomedan, or a baptized infidel is as such capable of making meritorious acts of divine faith, because he bears in his soul the indelible mark of baptism. ”

“ Alas! a man must be really indifferent to God and religion, he must be without heart and without reason to tolerate quietly such religious errors. It is in the very nature of every honest man when he has the truth, to guard it with jealous watchfulness, and to repel with indignation every admixture of falsehood.
Look at the teacher of mathematics, when he discovers an error in the calculation of his pupils, does he not condemn it—is he not intolerant? ”

“ We see around us numberless jarring sects, contradicting one another; we see the one condemning what the other approves, and approving what others condemn; we see some embracing certain divine truths, and others rejecting those truths with horror, as the doctrine of devils. Now common-sense tells every one that both parties cannot be right; that the true religion cannot be on either side. Among such confusion of opinions, the mind is naturally at a loss how to discover that one true Church in whose bosom the truth is to be found. ”

“ All hail to thee, dear and ever-blessed Mother, thou chosen one, thou well-beloved, thou Bride adorned, thou chaste, Immaculate Spouse, thou Universal Queen! all hail to thee! We honor thee, for God honors thee; we love thee, for God loves thee; we obey thee, for thou ever commandest the will of thy Lord. The passers-by may jeer thee; the servants of the prince of this world may call thee black; the daughters of the uncircumcised may beat thee; earth and hell may rise up in wrath against thee, and seek to despoil thee of thy rich ornaments and to sully thy fair name ”

“ You may convince a man that the Catholic Church is the true Church, but he will not, on that account, become a Catholic. Our Saviour himself was known by many, and yet he was followed only by few. Faith, then, is something more than knowledge. Knowledge is the submission of the understanding to truth; but faith implies also the submission of the will to the truth. It is for this reason that the light or grace of faith must also move the will, because a good will always belongs to faith, since no one can believe unless he is willing to believe. ”

“ Those poor souls, for whom our Lord shed his precious blood, for whom bleed afresh the dear wounds in his hands, his feet, his side, bound in the chains of error and sin, sus­pended over the precipice, ready to drop into the abyss below, admonish all who have hearts of flesh, or any bowels of compassion, to speak out, to cry aloud in awful and piercing tones to warn them of their danger, rather than by ingenious distinctions or qualifications to flatter them, or to have the appearance of flattering them, with the hope that, after all, their condition is not perilous. ”

“ He does not even pretend to go by any moral rule, but he demands what he thinks is an American's prerogative, to be his own master in all things, and to profess what he pleases, asking no one's leave, and accounting any one unutterably impertinent who dares to say a word against his going to perdition, if he likes it, in his own way. With such a man the right of conscience means the very right and freedom of conscience to dispense with conscience, to ignore a Law-giver and Judge, to be independent of unseen obligations ”

“ Christ assures us that the way to everlasting life is narrow, and trodden by few. The Catholic religion is that narrow road to heaven. Protestantism, on the contrary, is that broad way to perdition trodden by so many. He who is content to follow the crowd, condemns himself by taking the broad way. A man says, "I would like to believe, but I cannot." You say you "cannot believe." But what have you done, what means have you employed, in order to acquire the gift of faith? If you have neglected the means, you show clearly that you do not desire the end. ”

“ God is the only fountain of truth; truth alone leads to him, as it comes from him who is Truth itself. If this be so, what right can there be for any one to obscure the truth? What right can there be for a liberal-minded priest to profess Liberalism, a mixture of true and false principles? “A thing,” says St. Thomas Aquinas, “becomes impure by mixing it with a worse substance, as, for instance, gold mixed with brass, or silver with lead; in like manner, truth becomes worse and loses the splendor of its purity by mixing it with error. ”

“ Who has not witnessed the wonderful protection of the Catholic Church? Who has not read the truths of the Catholic Church, even in Protestant newspapers? Who has not heard of the conversion of so many wealthy and learned Protestants to the Catholic Church? The Lord, who wishes that all should come to the knowledge of the true religion, makes use of these and other means to cause doubts to arise in the souls of those who are separated from his Church. Hence it is, as Bishop Hay says, next to the impossible for those Protestants who live among Catholics to be in a state of invincible ignorance. ”

“ Every honest man guards the truth with the most jealous care, and will you blame the good Catholic for jealously guarding the highest truth—that truth which God himself has revealed—that truth upon which depends our whole happiness, here and hereafter?
"Our intellect,” says St. Thomas, “is formed for truth and cannot help thinking according to truth. The intellect is not a faculty or power which is, in itself, free, as the will is. Wheresoever it sees the truth it cannot help embracing it. ”

“ By those out of the Church, certainly, and hence the great reason why they are content to live and die out of the Church? Is it denied by those in the Church? What Catholic dare deny it? To what individual or class of individuals are we authorized by our holy faith to promise even the bare possibility of salvation, without being joined to the visible communion of the Church of God? No doubt, the truth is always to be adhered to, let the consequences be what they may. ”

“ The life of the Church, as all theologians teach, is in the mutual commerce of the exterior and interior, the body and soul; and therefore no individual not joined to her body can live her life. Indeed, to suppose that communion with the Body alone will suffice, is to fall into mere formalism, to mistake the corpse for the living man; and, on the other hand, to suppose that communion with the soul out of the body and independent of it is practicable, is to fall into pure spiritualism, simple Quakerism, which tapers off into Transcendentalism or sentimentalism. ”

“ When we do something, we must be morally sure that what we are doing is lawful. To do something, and have, at the same time, a reasonable doubt about the lawfulness of our action, is to commit sin, because we expose, ourselves to the danger of sin; If we act in such a doubt about the lawfulness of our action, we show ourselves indifferent as to whether we break a law or not, and consequently make ourselves guilty of the sin to the danger of which we expose ourselves. Hence St. Paul says: "Anything that is not according to conscience, is a sin." ”

“ True charity forbids us to despise those who are in error; on the contrary, it teaches us to pity and to love them. But there is a great difference between loving those in error, and loving the error itself; there is a vast difference between loving the sinner and loving his sins.
It is not our business to say whether this or that one who was not received into the Church before his death is damned. What we condemn is the Protestant and the heathen system of religion, because they are utterly false; but we do not condemn any person—God alone is the judge of all. ”

“ Whenever the word Church is used generally, without any specific qualification, expressed or necessarily implied, it means, by its own force, the visible as well as the invisible Church, the Body no less than the Soul; for the Body, the visible or external communion, is not a mere accident, but is essential to the Church. The Church, by her very definition, is the congregation of men called by God through the evangelical doctrine, and professing the true Christian faith under their infallible Pastor and Head - the Pope. ”

“ We cannot believe absolutely a divine truth proposed for our belief unless we know that such a truth is proposed for our belief by an infallible and divine authority; it is only then that both the intellect and the will are infallibly directed to believe, and to adhere to the object of faith—God and his revealed truths—as the principle end of man, on account of which he assents to divine truths. As this infallible and divine authority is found only in the Catholic Church, it is evident that true acts of faith can be made only by him who adheres to this authority. ”

“ What wickedness, what impiety to sneer at what is good, in the present and in the future, for the intellect and will of man! How detestable are they who entangle men in the subtle webs of sophisms, and expel religion and morality from the hearts of men, who instil doubts and disputes about social truth, which is the only stable foundation on which nations and empires can tranquilly repose! Most execrable men, those who assume the right to insult the Lord and to destroy man. ”

“ Such a marvelous prodigy, such a sudden spiritual renovation of the soul of a man, is a most extra-ordinary grace, which Almighty God can grant, even to a great sinner in his last hour. “As God is good," says St. Augustine, "he may save a person without any merits on his part."
Almighty God can also, by a miracle, carry a priest to a person invincibly ignorant and living up to the dictates of his conscience; or he can carry such a person to a priest--­or make use of an angel or a saint to lead him to the way of salvation. ”

“ He who denies but one of those truths, or hesitates to receive one of them, is not a Catholic. He claims to exercise the right of private judgement in regard to the doctrine of Christ, and therefore he is a heretic. The true Catholic knows and believes that there can be no compromise between God and the devil, between truth and error, between orthodox faith and heresy, between divine and human faith, between true and false Christianity, between Catholics and Protestants. ”