Various

“ A prince, tired of war and politics, devotes his castle and domain to the foundation of a monastery and assumes the religious habit. An artist, a poet, an orator, a great scholar, convinced of the futility of chasing the shadow of earthly glory, consecrates his gifts and acquisitions to religion. In like manner all that the human race had gained in civilization, in empire, in wealth, in philosophy and literature and art, was so much material accumulated for the spirit and genius of Christianity to appropriate and employ in the work of the regeneration of mankind. ”

“ About a mile from the little village of Corneilla-del-Vercol is the hermitage of Notre Dame du Paradis—in Latin, Regina Cœli. A fifteen minutes’ walk across the sunny plain brings you to it. It is in a retired spot well calculated to diffuse peace in the soul, and you pass out of the air tremulous with heat into the cool, solitary chapel with a delightful feeling of repose. The hermit, varying his duties by cultivating the land adjoining, may well find a calm happiness at the feet of Our Lady of Paradise. ”

“ Humanity, literally disinherited of the love of God, was dying of the selfishness of Voltaire. From the heart of this diseased society came a despairing cry for love, brotherhood, association. Then started up innovators on all sides to turn this great need of the human soul to their own account. They proclaimed universal association through universal love; and as Newton had reconciled by the discovery of gravitation the forces of earth and air, so they pretended to build on the attraction of love a permanent harmony between human nature and society. ”

“ He delights in the contemplation of the beauty of his own human nature, in the works which he performed through it, in its dignity and exaltation, in the splendor of the Blessed Virgin Mary, of the angels and the saints, in his entire and universal kingdom both of mind and matter. He delights in loving his companions in celestial glory, and in receiving their love, in radiating light and beauty and happiness all around himself through countless realms of space and numberless multitudes of beings. His human nature was not essentially changed at the resurrection, but only glorified. ”

“ How, it asks, should the will of a dying man be able to transmit beyond his grave a domain to his posterity? Down with a privilege which gives man, when he is a corpse, a posthumous omnipotence in contradiction with the very condition of the dead, and injurious to the freedom of action of the living! Socialism thus saps every conservative family principle, and the spirit it instils into the human mind is destructive to the foundations of home society, in order that it may prepare a clearer path to the eventual destruction of public society. ”

“ Slashing criticisms are in great favor. Oh! for another Macaulay to blast another Montgomery. We say, Oh! for another Pope to place these gentlemen in another Dunciad. There is no merit in cutting a book to pieces. An eye sharpened by malice and on the lookout for faults will detect blunders in a title. Where merited chastisement must be inflicted it should not be spared; but that is a poor idea of literary criticism that views it as a medium of communicating only stinging comment and bitter diatribe. Criticism is essentially calm and judicial. It should sift a book as law does evidence. ”

“ And yet you will find religion attending the birth of every new society; you will meet it at the source of every growing society, and will perceive it shining and triumphing when that society has reached its utmost greatness and perfection, for a great heathen writer has truly called it the motive force of all things: Omnia religione moventur. Religion is to the world of men what sap is to the plant, blood to the animal, electricity to the system of nature—an indispensable condition of life, of motion, of fruitfulness. ”

“ The old Ireland, the land of confiscation and bitter penury, of enforced ignorance and compulsory poverty, of chronic revolution and periodical famine, the exercise-ground of political proscription and religious persecution, is passing away under our eyes. A new Ireland is indeed springing up in its place—by no means a land as yet flowing with milk and honey, and stripped of all that cumbered it and darkened its life before, but a land full of hopeful possibilities for all good in itself and for good to its neighbors and the world at large. ”

“ Let the old social Babylon crumble and decay, and from her fruitful ruins, if needful even watered with blood, let the new Jerusalem of society come forth. Social reform was the dream of our fathers; social transformation is but another dream, a generous fallacy, but still a fallacy, attempting impossibilities and ending in nothingness. A ruin cannot be reformed nor a crumbling shed transformed; we see only a building to pull down and a building to put up. What I will do is this: I will use the popular arm to destroy, and on the ruins of the past I will erect the edifice of the future. ”

“ How could she sacrifice to the genius of Voltaire all that she had of French genius in those times of Charlemagne, of Godfrey de Bouillon, of St. Louis, of Joan of Arc, of Richelieu, of Louis XIV., when those who were her chief ornaments by their brilliant virtues so little resembled Voltaire? To pretend that a nation which has deserved to be called by Shakspere ‘the soldier of God’; a nation that has given to religion so many saints and heroes, so many doctors and martyrs; a nation that has raised by its thought and art so many monuments to Catholicity ”

“ The man who has cast off the yoke of the church, the traditions of his race, and the honest suggestions of his conscience has already joined the ranks of the arch-deceiver who first flattered us with hopes of divinity, and now tempts us with unbounded visions of the enlightenment of the world, social progress, the political amelioration of the human race, the downfall of all tyranny in church and state, and the splendid advent of the coming man; but he only lures us to that awful destruction which hurled him from heaven because of the usurping thought, “I will become like unto the Most High.” ”

“ The permanency of the original traditions of the human family is so remarkable a phenomenon, in view of the perishableness of merely human records, that the most sceptical minds have been struck with fear and amazement. It is like the living proof of the Psalmist’s words: “If I go up into heaven, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and flee to the outermost ends of the earth, thou art there!” Even the pantheism of Brahminism is something entirely distinct from the confusion and chaos of the Religion of Humanity. ”

“ They never will find the light of truth until they return to the true church of Jesus Christ, and by her lamp recover the lost clew which guides the steps of the wayfarer through the labyrinth. The one dark mystery which like a cloud overshadows the bright disc of light “which enlighteneth every man coming into this world,” the mystery of moral evil and its punishment, cannot be ignored or reasoned away. Catholic theology does not create this mystery but finds it existing. It cannot remove it, but it, so to speak, absorbs it in another, the mystery of moral probation. ”

“ You forget that if the divine Reformer came to found a new society, it was by a new creation, and not through destruction; that he came to rehabilitate even bodily society while he created the true kingdom of souls; and that, far from breathing into it the spirit of social hatred and jealousy, he came to restore, or rather found within it, the rule of love and social self-denial. The very goal which the socialist idea has reached by identifying itself with the idea of social destruction is itself the best proof of the irreconcilable antagonism between socialism and Christianity. ”

“ For it is true that it were easier for the tree to live without sap, the plant without root, the body without blood, than it is for the human soul to exist without religion—religion, that need of something divine, that longing after something durable, that step towards the infinite; religion, that natural breath of the soul, as the air is of the body, that attraction heavenwards which corresponds to the physical attraction earthwards of our body! ”

“ Through this divine Heart I worship thee for all who worship thee not; I love thee for all who love thee not; I acknowledge thee for all the wilfully blind who through contempt acknowledge thee not. I wish by this divine Heart to fulfil the duty of all men. In spirit I traverse the whole world to seek all the souls ransomed by the most precious Blood of my divine Spouse, in order to satisfy thee for them all by this divine Heart. I embrace them in order to present them to thee through it, and by it I ask of thee their conversion. ”

“ God does not command our belief without giving us evidence that he is God; Jesus Christ does not require our submission to his divine authority without giving us evidence that he is the Son of God; the pope does not exact our obedience to his infallible judgments without giving us evidence that he is the Vicar of Christ and the Vicegerent of God on earth. The Catholic religion makes no demand for irrational assent to anything. It is not mere logic and philosophy, but it contains both in their ultimate perfection, and will bear the most rigorous rational examination. ”

“ But the absurdity of such an assumption is so evident that there can be no mistake about it. Science knows, or pretends to know, matter and force; but it knows nothing about right and wrong, nothing about virtue and vice, nothing about religion and moral law, nothing about the origin and the finality of things, and it is so ignorant (we speak of advanced science) that it even fails to see the absolute necessity of a Creator. Is it not ridiculous, then, to assume that there may be no hell because modern science professes to know nothing about its existence? ”

“ Why can they go into hysterics of admiration over Socrates, Voltaire, and Shakspere, yet foam with fury at the name of Jesus? They will not even credit our Saviour with effecting the slightest moral good in the world, but refer to his blessed religion as a darkness and blight on the human intellect. Surely no true measure for the elevation of humanity would throw aside Christianity. But it is clear that these men have no true love for man. It is only their insufferable pride that will not bend the knee before Christ, or bend it in mockery like Renan and the author of Ecce Homo. ”

“ Ignatius from Montserrat in his newly-put-on garments of holy poverty, which could not, we fancy, hide his courtly bearing or eagle glance.
Nothing could surpass the exquisite gradations of light and color that passed over the landscape while the sun was going down. The pleasant valley grew dim. Manresa receded, and her white walls soon looked like a ship at sea. A purple mist began to creep up the mountain-sides. The snowy summits were suffused with a blush of rosy light. The last gleam of the sun, now below the western horizon, flashed from peak to peak like signal-fires, and then died away. ”

“ The socialist idea directly attacks the principle of property—that is, individual possession of one’s fields, house, capital, or patrimony, so happily called the domain; property—that is, in the common order of things, the fruit of individual labor or of the labor and self-denial of one’s forefathers; property—that is, the pledge of man’s independence, and the sign of his kingship in his own home, small as it may be; property, which in all nations and ages has been sheltered under the triple shield of nature, justice, and religion ”

“ Christianity is the only system of religion that has made philosophy its handmaiden and used it to elucidate its doctrines. It is, in fact, the only religious system that can confidently appeal to the higher powers of reason, and hence it is the only creed that has ever made really intellectual conquests, that has ever compelled rationalism and scepticism to pause before it and believe, or at least doubt. Christianity alone, among all the religions of the world, has been able to exact the complete homage of the minds as well as the hearts of cultivated men. ”

“ If art alone could ensure the perpetuity of a religion, the religion of Greece would still remain. Neither the eloquence of St. Paul nor the sublime maxims of the Gospel which he preached would have been able to supplant it. But God has implanted in the mind of man the desire for the true as well as for the beautiful; and the possession of truth alone can satisfy the soul.
The Athenians were always in great unrest on religious matters; they were ever inquiring, ever disputing, ever seeking out new gods and new forms of worship, and of course were never satisfied. ”

“ The lifeless mass which was left behind was only fit to be buried as a putrescent carcass. The mission of the Roman Empire was also completed, its destruction decreed, and dimly foretold by the apostles. The entire Greco-Roman civilization, with its philosophy, its literature, its religious superstitions, had run its course, and its ultimate result was an intellectual and moral abyss of vacancy and unfulfilled longing for the truth and the good which alone can fill the frightful void in the human soul and in universal humanity caused by the absence of God. ”

“ Beyond tower the calm, grand heights of the Canigou, that, like the contemplative soul, stands above the world, its gray sides relieved by no soft green pasture-land, and yielding no corn or oil to man, but holding in its stern recesses the cold glacier springs whose waters pour down through summer heat from its storehouses of ice and snow to refresh the thirsty plain, fit emblem of the holy influences that rain down from the sanctuaries it overshadows. ”

“ He delights in filth, and filth they serve him in abundance. From every cess-pool and garbage-plot, from every loathsome swamp and poisonous marsh, from every infected spot, a thick cloud laden with nauseous odors and death rises up to his nostrils. Surely the god must be satisfied. What else has he sought during his long career from his boyhood to his old age? To what did he devote his wonderful activity but to create those very sinks of moral degradation which send back to him from their unclean depths the impure homage which they are fit to give? ”

“ Thus it was that Christian philosophy encountered Greek philosophy on the summit of Mars’ Hill, and silenced and dethroned it; and during twenty centuries thus has it silenced and dethroned every system that has come in conflict with it; and although its supremacy has been constantly disputed, it still remains supreme in the domain of reason and of truth. In cultivated Athens we behold the highest point to which unaided human reason can attain, and it is in cultivated Athens that we first find Christianity asserting its claim to be the gospel of reason as well as of faith. ”

“ I fight only under two flags, that of society and that of Christianity. Even in the harshest strictures I may make I shall attack things, not men—things which we are bound to oppose, not men, whom we are bound to love.
To come to a full understanding of contemporary socialism it is necessary to look at it under a triple aspect—as an idea, as a passion, and as an action; as an idea which gains ground, a passion which kindles itself, an action which organizes itself more and more under our eyes; as an idea which gains ground by every channel controlled by the contemporary press ”

“ It is to be noted, too, since the most trifling incidents in the life of a hero are worthy of record, that he yawned with such admirable self-possession, with such a mingling of good-will and graceful languor; he had so much the air of giving his whole mind to it, and at the same time of being so used to yawning that he really didn’t care so much for it after all, that you saw at once he was a man of distinction, to whom a yawn was not, as to most of us, a rare luxury, but a daily, nay, an hourly, a half-hourly, necessary of life. ”

“ Is it so wonderful that she mistakes her narrow circle for the universe, and sees nothing but wickedness in all the world? How many do this in real life!
There is the wonderful Nabob himself, risen from nowhere, to whom one of the strange turns of Fortune’s wheel sent a fabulous fortune gathered by his own hard and not too scrupulous hands in Algeria. He is ignorant, vulgar, low, without any very strong moral sense, but with a really kind and good heart: he goes to Paris with his millions, and his millions conquer Paris—as long as they last. ”

“ We have known very able men who were prevented from seeing the truth of Catholicity by the dense clouds of incense that their admirers continually wafted before their shrines. The fulness of divine faith which he lacks, and for which he seems mournfully to cry out, is in the happy possession of the humblest child of the Catholic religion; not, as he would think, merely instinctive or the result of education, but living and logical, the gift and grace of the Holy Ghost. Emerson is no theologian, though once a Protestant minister, which fact, however, would not argue much for his theology. ”

“ Nay, were the liberals successful in effecting their daring purpose, which is the separation of the people from the see of Peter, then indeed would the political unity of Italy receive its death-blow; then indeed would the bond which unites the Italian people be severed, the bond of one faith, the bond of the only unity they really can boast of—religious unity. It were well if the demagogues of Italy bestowed the necessary consideration upon the incomparable uniting force of religion to a people, instead of promoting and hailing with delight every measure devised to destroy it. ”