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TO

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self, they were forced to fall back on what is simply human for their support. They asserted sometimes the supremacy of the state against the supremacy of the Church ; but this was only a human authority; for the state is human. They asserted, also, the supremacy of the Scriptures, taken on and interpreted by a human authority. But this, again, was only asserting the supremacy of man ; for the Scriptures, so taken and interpreted, are only a human authority, and impose no faith but what each interpreter chooses to find in them. They asserted, in fine, the right of private judgment. But this all the world knows is human ; and no one who has analyzed their movement doubts for a moment, that, reduced to its general formula, it is, MAN IS SUPREME, AND IS PLACE OF GOD.

Nor was this the device of Protestantism alone. There was very little originality in the Protestant movement. It proceeded on the principle common to all movements, no matter in what age or country, against the City of God, and did but continue the protest which our first parents, through the seductions of the Serpent, made in the Garden. There may be development and modification of external representation from age to age, or from place to place; but there is no substantial change. The principle is always the same.

It is always in the name of man, always under pretence of bringing up and out the human element, that religion is opposed. The effort is always to create an antagonism between the love of God and the love of man, or to subordinate God to man. “Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” That is, if we may paraphrase it, -“ The command you suppose God has given you, and which you suppose you must keep, is tyrannical; it degrades your nature, cripples its energies, enslaves its affections, and hinders the development and growth of its godlike faculties. If you were free, or if you had the courage, to eat the forbidden fruit, your eyes would be opened; you would not need to see by another's eyes ; you would know good and evil, and not with another's knowledge, but with your own knowledge, for yourselves, in like manner as God himself knows in and of himself, without another to teach him. Has God said, Ye shall not eat, lest ye die ? Nonsense. Believe no such thing. Can God wish to keep you children and slaves for ever? What pleasure can he take in the homage of those who have no mind, no will of their own, who dare neither think nor act but as they are bid? No ; God loves the

free, bold, manly spirit, that acts from choice, affection, not from compulsion. Would you be acceptable to him, you must entertain more worthy notions of him, divest yourselves of your idle fears, of the silly notion that God requires you to submit to a command that would keep you for ever weak and puny slaves. There is a soul within you ; let that speak; listen to that ; follow it, and be free, be great, be noble, be gods.” So spake the serpent ; Eve was charmed, and no doubt fancied that the best way to render herself acceptable to God would be to disobey him. But be this as it may, the temptation which seduced her from her allegiance was the elevation of the human, the glory and dignity of man.

The same temptation is repeated in our days. The Church

opposed from the same motives that Satan urged in the beginning. What hear we? “ The Church is dangerous to the

. state ; it is hostile to liberty ; it obscures the dignity of human nature ; it does not respect the rights of man; denies private judgment ; tyrannizes over the freeborn mind; and is in the way of intellectual and social progress.” All the popular charges the age prefers against the Church are reducible to these several heads, and therefore all oppose man to God, the human to the divine. It were easy to prove this by reference to the literature of the day, to the movements and boasts of the age ; but the fact is so salient that it is not necessary.

The real characteristic of the Antichristian, that is, Anticatholic, world is, in brief, the SUPREMACY OF MÁN. It makes man its God, its master, the end for which it must strive, and the fountain from which it must derive its light and strength. It is man against God. There can be no denial of this fact. Whoso wars against the Church wars against Christianity, and whoso wars against Christianity wars against God. Let no one deceive himself on this point. Christianity is not an abstraction nor a dead letter ; it is a living organism, the Church, and without the Church it is not, is inconceivable. The distinctions you imagine between Christianity and the Church — the Roman Catholic Church, we mean mere moonshine. No such distinctions are possible. God did not first give you a Christianity, and then build up, or leave you to build up, a Christian church around it, to embody and express more or less of it. He gave the Church in the beginning, and gave you nothing but what is included integrally in it. When you oppose the Church, you oppose the religion of God, and God himself. You cannot NEW SERIES. - VOL. I. NO. I.

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do otherwise, if you would. There is no middle course for you. You must either say, God, and man for the sake of God, or, Man, and God, if at all, for the sake of man. There is no need of words or wry faces. Here is the plain, indisputable fact. There is no medium between the two possible in the nature of things. You are on the Lord's side, or you are against it. If you are on his side, you are on the side of the Church in which he is universally and permanently present unto the consummation of the world'; if you are on the side opposed to the Church, you are on the side opposed to God. No verbiage, no sophistry, no art or ingenuity, can alter this fact ; and the sooner you become convinced of it, and look this fact steadily in the face, the better will it be for all of you who are carrying on your unhallowed war against God's Holy Church.

But, assuming the fact to be as we state it, what have the enemies of religion to offer us? In general terms, they offer us man, represented in the family, native land, and universal brotherhood. M. Michelet opposes to the Church simply, if we abstract his verbiage, family and native land. These are the means and end of man's existence. These are M. Michelet's religion.“ France," he says, “is a religion." These he would substitute in the place of religion, and he would educate solely in reference to them. He opposes the Church because she insists on educating for God, and subordinating family and country to God, and teaching us they are good and holy only when sought or loved for God's sake. Others add to family and country, or, one may almost say, substitute for them, universal brotherhood, and place the supreme excellence of moral character in PHILANTHROPY.

These are philanthropists, and test all things by their schemes for the general improvement of mankind. They do not ask, Is the Church divine, is she from God, commissioned by God himself to teach us what we shall believe and do ? But they ask, Is she an abolitionist, a teetotaller, a radical, a socialist?

Now we certainly respect family, native land, brotherhood, and hold them to be sacred, when elevated by religion to her own order, and referred to God as the end for which they are, and are to be loved and sought. So viewed, we have as much to say in their favor as have the Antichristian reformers themselves, and perhaps more too. The madness of these reformers does not consist in their devotion to them, but in their devotion to them for their own sake, as detached from

God, the end for which they are, and made to be ends in themselves. This is their madness ; and it is precisely here where lies their power of deception. Religion consecrates all these terms. T'he Gospel pronounces marriage holy, and makes it a sacrament; what do I, then, when I extol it, but what the Gospel itself does ? The Gospel enjoins patriotism; when I present the claims of native land, and ask that all be trained to love it, am I not following out the Gospel ? The Gospel declares that love is the perfection of the law, that he who loveth dwelleth in God and God in him, for God is love ; when, then, I proclaim the excellence of love, make love the basis of my system, and call upon all to love one another, and to live as brothers, what do I but follow both the spirit and the letter of the Gospel ? This looks plausible, and the uninstructed and unwary may not at first sight perceive wherein lies the sophistry, or wherein they who reason thus are opposed to Christianity.

Marriage, when blessed by the Church, is a sacrament, and when sought for God's sake, is indeed holy, but not otherwise. Patriotism is a duty, and is meritorious, when we love and serve our country from love of God, not when we love and serve it simply for its own sake. Love is the perfection or fulfilling of the law, when understood in the Gospel sense for charity ; not when it is understood in the human sense for philanthropy. The error lies in the neglect of these distinctions, and in predicating of marriage, patriotism, love of mankind, when referred simply to what is human as the end, what may with truth be predicated of them when they are referred to God. The enemies of the City of God say, because family, native land, brotherhood, when referred to God, are sacred, and to seek them is a religious act, to seek them is a religious act when they are not so referred ; because to love our neighbour as ourselves, for the love of God, is a precept of the divine law, — to love him for his own sake, without reference to the love of God, is the fulfilling of that precept; and because whoso loves God must love his brother also, God is loved in man, not man in God.

Now all this makes man the end, and supreme, and, if our modern reformers were not stark blind, they could not fail to perceive their absurdity. There is a solemn truth burnt into the heart of every man who has had some little experience of life, that man never suffices for man, and therefore that nothing human is ever sufficient for itself. The good to be derived

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from marriage, from native land, from universal brotherhood, is never attainable when they are sought for their own sake, and not for the sake of God. When sought for his sake, there is all the good derivable from them which our reformers allege ; but by no means when sought for their own sake, as all experience proves.

The age prates everywhere of love, of woman, and of family. Nothing is more remarkable than the rank assigned to woman, and the reliance that is placed on her for whatever good is looked for. She is made the Church, and men nowadays ask from her what in the ages of faith they asked from the Immaculate Spouse of the Lamb; and the worship we pay to the Blessed Mother of God is, in more instances than one, taken by persons out of the Church to be symbolical of the worship due to the sex. M. Michelet tells us, man is man only when with a wife, with whom he is married or not married ; and Frederika Bremer, the popular Swedish novelist, whose works even the Dublin Review has commended, with only a faint whisper of dissent, confounds the sentiment of two passionate lovers for each other with the love of God, apparently regarding it as one of the purest and highest forms of charity. It would not be difficult to trace the same doctrine through no small portion of that literature which at once forms and expresses the age. All this may be very fine and charming in one of love's paroxysms, but the love of man for woman, and of woman for man, taken in its most honest sense, never suffices for itself; and pure and hallowed as may be woman's gentle influence, when she herself loves God supremely and exclusively, it can never be safely appealed to when she does not so love him. Her influence, when religion is wanting, is more fatal than that of man himself. What is said of her, the appeals made to her, and the flattery bestowed on her by this age, only mark its luxury and gross corruption.

We may love, should love, - but God only. All else that is loved must be loved in him and for him. This is as true in relation to the mutual love of husband and wife, of parents and children, as in relation to any other love. And when this is forgotten or neglected, the love is full of misery and wretched

Our novelists delight to picture two young lovers, all and all to each other, living only one for the other, unable to live one without the other, seeing their heaven in each other's eyes, and shocked at the bare thought that either could find a heaven hereafter, save in the presence of the other. Ade