One Devil Goes, Another One Always Enters
by Thomas A. Droleskey
A world where Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is not recognized by men and their nations as King is one where the devil will reign supreme, hatching and executing all sorts of naturalistic plots to convince people that they can have a veritable paradise on earth by means of material success and as a result of electoral politics.
The devil, whose head has been crushed by the heel of the New Eve, Our Lady, the very Mother of God Himself, wants to convince fallen men, whose souls he desires to take into Hell within for all eternity so that they can be tormented by burning flames and by the loss of the Beatific Vision forever, that they have the power to remake the world on their own without submitting to the Deposit of Faith that Our Lord has entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Church and without having belief in, access to and cooperation with Sanctifying Grace. The devil does not want fallen men to believe that nations are reformed by the reform of their own lives in cooperation with the graces won for them by the shedding of every single drop of Our Lord's Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross and that flow into their hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, the Mediatrix of All Graces. No, the world must be "reformed" by secular saviours who want to increase the size and the scope of the government's control over our daily lives while at the same time promoting public policies that are in direct defiance of God's Holy Laws and thus contrary to the eternal good of souls. Alas, what is contrary to the eternal good of souls is contrary to the common temporal good of men and their nations.
Once again, let's get this straight once-and-for-all: any nation that does not recognize the Social Reign of Christ the King must perforce fall into the grip of the devil, who delights in the blasphemies committed in the name of "religious liberty" and who takes full advantages of Modernity's concept of "civil liberty" to promote the very ruin of souls and thus of nations spoken about so prophetically by Pope Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832:
This shameful font of indifferentism gives rise to that absurd and erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone. It spreads ruin in sacred and civil affairs, though some repeat over and over again with the greatest impudence that some advantage accrues to religion from it. "But the death of the soul is worse than freedom of error," as Augustine was wont to say. When all restraints are removed by which men are kept on the narrow path of truth, their nature, which is already inclined to evil, propels them to ruin. Then truly "the bottomless pit" is open from which John saw smoke ascending which obscured the sun, and out of which locusts flew forth to devastate the earth. Thence comes transformation of minds, corruption of youths, contempt of sacred things and holy laws -- in other words, a pestilence more deadly to the state than any other. Experience shows, even from earliest times, that cities renowned for wealth, dominion, and glory perished as a result of this single evil, namely immoderate freedom of opinion, license of free speech, and desire for novelty.
Here We must include that harmful and never sufficiently denounced freedom to publish any writings whatever and disseminate them to the people, which some dare to demand and promote with so great a clamor. We are horrified to see what monstrous doctrines and prodigious errors are disseminated far and wide in countless books, pamphlets, and other writings which, though small in weight, are very great in malice. We are in tears at the abuse which proceeds from them over the face of the earth. Some are so carried away that they contentiously assert that the flock of errors arising from them is sufficiently compensated by the publication of some book which defends religion and truth. Every law condemns deliberately doing evil simply because there is some hope that good may result. Is there any sane man who would say poison ought to be distributed, sold publicly, stored, and even drunk because some antidote is available and those who use it may be snatched from death again and again?
Does this not describe the contemporary lot of the United States of America, which refuses to recognize the truth contained in the following papal pronouncements, from which no Catholic is free to dissent in the slightest (please see
Reference Resource: The Binding Nature of Catholic Social Teaching)?
The more closely the temporal power of a nation aligns itself with the spiritual, and the more it fosters and promotes the latter, by so much the more it contributes to the conservation of the commonwealth. For it is the aim of the ecclesiastical authority by the use of spiritual means, to form good Christians in accordance with its own particular end and object; and in doing this it helps at the same time to form good citizens, and prepares them to meet their obligations as members of a civil society. This follows of necessity because in the City of God, the Holy Roman Catholic Church, a good citizen and an upright man are absolutely one and the same thing. How grave therefore is the error of those who separate things so closely united, and who think that they can produce good citizens by ways and methods other than those which make for the formation of good Christians. For, let human prudence say what it likes and reason as it pleases, it is impossible to produce true temporal peace and tranquillity by things repugnant or opposed to the peace and happiness of eternity. (Silvio Cardinal Antoniano, quoted in Pope Pius XI's Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)
This generative and conservative power of the virtues that make for salvation is therefore lost, whenever morality is dissociated from divine faith. A system of morality based exclusively on human reason robs man of his highest dignity and lowers him from the supernatural to the merely natural life. Not but that man is able by the right use of reason to know and to obey certain principles of the natural law. But though he should know them all and keep them inviolate through life-and even this is impossible without the aid of the grace of our Redeemer-still it is vain for anyone without faith to promise himself eternal salvation. "If anyone abide not in Me, he shall be cast forth as a branch, and shall wither, and they shall gather him up and cast him into the fire, and he burneth" john xv., 6). "He that believeth not shall be condemned" (Mark xvi., 16). We have but too much evidence of the value and result of a morality divorced from divine faith. How is it that, in spite of all the zeal for the welfare of the masses, nations are in such straits and even distress, and that the evil is daily on the increase? We are told that society is quite able to help itself; that it can flourish without the assistance of Christianity, and attain its end by its own unaided efforts. Public administrators prefer a purely secular system of government. All traces of the religion of our forefathers are daily disappearing from political life and administration. What blindness! Once the idea of the authority of God as the Judge of right and wrong is forgotten, law must necessarily lose its primary authority and justice must perish: and these are the two most powerful and most necessary bonds of society. Similarly, once the hope and expectation of eternal happiness is taken away, temporal goods will be greedily sought after. Every man will strive to secure the largest share for himself. Hence arise envy, jealousy, hatred. The consequences are conspiracy, anarchy, nihilism. There is neither peace abroad nor security at home. Public life is stained with crime. (Pope Leo XIII, Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900.)
. . . .
For there is no true civilization without a moral civilization, and no true moral civilization without the true religion: it is a proven truth, a historical fact. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)
Keep focused on these Catholic truths, my friends. Keep focused on them at all times. Do not let the sturm and drang of Modernity's siren call of naturalism infect your immortal souls to pollute how you view the events of the world. We are witnessing the logical, inevitable, inexorable degeneration of a world founded on false, naturalistic, religiously indifferentist and/or anti-Incarnational and semi-Pelagian principles. To put in the words of a priest in a Motu community who is a firm opponent of the heresy of Americanism, we are witnessing in the United States of America the perfect of the inherent degeneracy of the founding principles. Anyone who thinks that the flood tide of evil that is overwhelming us at present is going to be retarded by means of the electoral process is not seeing the world clearly as it is through the eyes of the true Faith
As I have noted in many other commentaries on this site throughout the course of this year, especially in
When Lesser is Greater. America's concentration camps (public schools) are producing hordes of barbarians immersed in all of the naturalistic ideologies of the moment. Many of the Catholic schools now in conciliar captivity are doing pretty much the same thing (look how many "Catholics" continue to support the presidential candidacy of the presumptive Democrat Party nominee, Senator Barack Obama, and how many supported--and are disappointed by the defeat of--Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton for proof of this point). Those who are prone to think that "things" will get better by means of the electoral process do not realize that the electorate in the United States of America is tilting ever more in the direction of the "leftist" bent of naturalism as opposed to the "rightist" bent of naturalism, both of which are but false "opposites" of the same diabolical coin that is minted in Hell and provides no place for the honoring the true God as He has revealed Himself through His true Church, less place still to give public honor to His Most Blessed Mother by means of Rosary Processions and pilgrimages.
Yes, one devil is about to leave the Democrat Party presidential race, although she is going kicking and screaming after still holding out hope that there was some way for her to get rewarded for all of those years she stood by her husband's side as she, the candidate of "women," trashed the very women who he had manipulated for his own purposes time and time again with utter impunity and without, of course, seeking out the Absolution that could be his at the hands of a true priest in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance. United States Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-New York, is through, at least for the year 2008, and quite possibly forever as a presidential candidate if her former rival, United States Senator Barack Obama, D-Illinois, wins the Presidency of the United States of America against Senator John McCain, R-Arizona, in one hundred fifty-one days from now. The scheming politico who came to national prominence solely on her adulterer husband's coattails--and has been at the epicenter of one scandal and abuse of power after another (Watergate, Travelgate, Chinagate, the billing records from the Rose Law Firm that just "happened" to wind up in the reading room of the second floor of the White House)--has lost her bid for the only thing that has ever mattered to her: the political power that she could have exercised as the first female President of the United States of America.
The defeat of Hillary Rodham Clinton, however, is no cause for rejoicing. A new devil, one far more dangerous that she ever was or ever will be, has emerged in the form of Barack Hussein Obama. Obama's supposedly "lofty" naturalistic rhetoric masks his Communist background. (See:
Barack Obama's Communist connections and
Moscow endorses Obama as US President; Russian Foreign Ministry official, former Soviet apparatchik articulates Kremlin line. Yes, Our Lady really, really meant that Russia would spread its errors if the proper consecration of Russia to her Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart was not done, which is why there is no greater triumph, albeit temporary, for the devil than to delay this consecration by means of false "popes" and false "bishops" who believe in the "civilization of love," not in the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.) Obama is just as militantly in favor of unrestricted baby-killing as is Hillary Rodham Clinton. He has demonstrated himself to be willing to pay his obeisance before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). He is vague about his naturalistic"ideas" because his true agenda involves a massive increase in the power exercised by the Federal government of the United States of America, and most likely a government-imposed crackdown on those deemed guilty of fomenting "hate speech," namely, those of us who oppose baby-killing and the agenda of those committed to unrepentant sins of perversity against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments. Oh, believe me, many of our fellow citizens will rejoice when such a crackdown occurs.
The political climate at present favors the election of the newest naturalist devil of the false opposite of the "left." President George Walker Bush has bankrupted the treasury of the United States of America on an unjust, immoral war that was based on misrepresented intelligence "facts" and designed to do the bidding of Israel in creating a series of "democratic" states in the Mohammedan world. Bush has violated legitimate liberties of citizens to increase the power of the Federal government of the United States of America even on matters of domestic policies that make Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Baines Johnson and even William Jefferson Blythe Clinton each seem like advocates of limited government. Bush has a presidential approval rating of just twenty-five percent according to a survey conducted by CBS News and The New York Times between May 30, 2008, and June 3, 2008, just one percentage point above that of then President Richard Milhous Nixon's when his resignation from the Presidency of the United States of America (announced on Thursday, August 8, 1974, preempting Ironside in the process, as he had done six years before on the same date when delivering his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida) became effective at noon, Eastern Daylight Saving Time, on Friday, August 9, 1974. The election is Obama's to lose.
The new naturalist devil of the "left" will get a lot of help from his Republican opponent Senator John McCain, a naturalist of no particular ideological bent who believes in absolutely nothing and is able to read a prepared speech only slightly better than the hapless septuagenarian who gave then President Bill Clinton a easy ride to a second term in 1996, the hapless, mercurial, inarticulate thirty-third degree Mason named Robert Joseph Dole, Jr., the former Majority Leader of the United States Senate. McCain stands a chance of winning this year for two reasons: (1) some voters will be reluctant to vote for Obama on the basis of his mixed-race background; and (2) Obama is vulnerable on the naturalistic grounds of what is considered to be "national defense" as he is not committed to the global "War on Terror" which McCain, although he has tried to distance himself from the current President Bush, supports and believes is the path by which the United States of America can remain "secure" against "radical Islam." (Neither Obama or McCain would dare admit that Mohammedanism in and of itself is violent and that its not-so-holy book, the Koran, preaches violence against "infidels" such as us.)
Lost on both the new leftist devil and the old Republican agent of the devil's naturalism will be the simple truth that no nation can ever make itself secure from attacks, whether they come from international terrorists or from Russia or China, from abroad as it makes warfare upon the innocent preborn on a daily basis. Never lose sight of the fact, ladies and gentlemen, that over four thousand innocent human beings are butchered in their mothers' wombs by means of surgical abortions every day. Thousands more die as a result of chemical abortifacients. Both Obama and McCain support surgical baby-killing, differing only on the extent to which they believe babies should be killed (Obama with no restrictions, McCain believing that babies can be sliced and diced under cover of law in the "hard" cases).
Both Obama and McCain support chemical abortifacients under cover of law. Neither Obama or McCain will seek to reverse the United States Food and Drug Administration's September, 2000, decision to permit the marketing of the human pesticide, RU-486, that has remained perfectly "legal" during the eighty-nine months, seventeen days of the "pro-life" administration of George Walker Bush. Neither will reverse the Food and Drug Administration's August 24, 2006, decision to permit the "behind the counter" sales of the "Plan B" "emergency contraceptive," approved during that wonderful "pro-life" George W. Bush's term. Nations that permit various evils under cover of law will reap the sorry consequences of their own defiance of the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law. No amount of "strategy" and no use of military force will keep a nation safe that defies God's laws and puts the innocent at risk while offending Him and undermining the eternal good of souls--and thus of the common temporal good--in the process.
Once again, for those who are "worried" about who gets elected and believe that we must settled for the "lesser of two evils," I propose yet again for those interested in a sober dose of Catholic reality that our steady acceptance of the so-called "lesser of two evils" in the past fifty years has only increased our toleration for what constitutes the so-called "lesser evil." In actual truth, you see, there is no distinction between the "greater" and "lesser" evils as all manner of evils are protected under cover of civil law and promoted in every aspect of popular culture, which is the essential point that I made nearly five months ago in When Lesser is Greater.
Pope Leo XIII, writing in Libertas, June 20, 1888, put the matter this way:
But, to judge aright, we must acknowledge that, the more a State is driven to tolerate evil, the further is it from perfection; and that the tolerance of evil which is dictated by political prudence should be strictly confined to the limits which its justifying cause, the public welfare, requires. Wherefore, if such tolerance would be injurious to the public welfare, and entail greater evils on the State, it would not be lawful; for in such case the motive of good is wanting. And although in the extraordinary condition of these times the Church usually acquiesces in certain modern liberties, not because she prefers them in themselves, but because she judges it expedient to permit them, she would in happier times exercise her own liberty; and, by persuasion, exhortation, and entreaty would endeavor, as she is bound, to fulfill the duty assigned to her by God of providing for the eternal salvation of mankind. One thing, however, remains always true -- that the liberty which is claimed for all to do all things is not, as We have often said, of itself desirable, inasmuch as it is contrary to reason that error and truth should have equal rights.
How much evil is the United States of America not simply "tolerating" but promoting actively at the present time?
Oh, you are perfectly free, of course, to get all wound up about the election in the next one hundred fifty-one days, spending your time on the blathering idiocy of the naturalists of the "left" and the "right" on talk radio programs and the various all-news television channels, none of which have any place in the Droleskey household whatsoever. You may think me daft for considering this all to be a gigantic waste of our good Catholic time. No matter who wins the presidential election in the United States of America in one hundred fifty-one days from now, that is, on Tuesday, November 4, 2008, the results for the next four years will be pretty much the same.
Lest you think that "progress" has been made with John Roberts and Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court of the United States of America, please be advised that these two jurists as legal positivists in the mode of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, both of whom do not believe that there they can subject the words of the Constitution of the United States of America to scrutiny by means of anything extrinsic, that is, to the very binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law. Each believes that state legislatures have the right to "permit" baby-killing if they choose to do so, basing their belief on their judgment, which is arguable even on the grounds of simple constitutional interpretation, that the Constitution neither permits nor prohibits baby-killing. Does God believe that any human institution of civil governance has the "right" to permit the killing of innocent human beings under cover of law? Progress? Think again. Think very hard. (Even if McCain gets elected on November 4, 2008, he will be elected along with an overwhelming majority of Democrats in both Houses of the United States Congress, possibly even a Senate that will be "filibuster-proof" for the Democrat Party. The likes of Alito and Roberts, not that they are the friends of Christ the King, mind you, will not find their way onto the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the next administration no matter who gets elected.)
The scions of the counterfeit church of conciliarism believe that evil can be retarded by means of making a "reconciliation" with the flawed premises of Modernity, refusing even to teach in the practical order of things the immutable doctrine of the Social Reign of Christ the King or to exhort Catholics to pray and to work for the conversion of their nations to the true Faith. They have made their accommodation with the precepts of Judeo-Masonry that serve as the bedrock foundation of the inherently degenerate principles whose perfection is being made manifest before our very eyes. They have dared to make to an alliance with the interdenominationalism desired by Belial himself and condemned by Pope Saint Pius X in Notre Charge Apostolique and by Pope Leo XIII in Custodi Di Quella Fede, December 8, 1892:
Everyone should avoid familiarity or friendship with anyone suspected of belonging to masonry or to affiliated groups. Know them by their fruits and avoid them. Every familiarity should be avoided, not only with those impious libertines who openly promote the character of the sect, but also with those who hide under the mask of universal tolerance, respect for all religions, and the craving to reconcile the maxims of the Gospel with those of the revolution. These men seek to reconcile Christ and Belial, the Church of God and the state without God. (Pope Leo XIII, Custodi Di Quella Fede, December 8, 1892.)
Who is it who has stated in writing his belief that the "Second:" Vatican Council represents the "Church's official reconciliation with the new era inaugurated in 1789"?
Let us be content to say here that the text serves as a countersyllabus and, as such, represents on the part of the Church, an attempt at an official reconciliation with the new era inaugurated in 1789. (Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 382.)
What happened in 1789? Wasn't there some kind of anti-Theistic revolution in France, the elder daughter of the Church? What did Pope Leo XIII write about such reconciling with the principles of the revolution?
Every familiarity should be avoided, not only with those impious libertines who openly promote the character of the sect, but also with those who hide under the mask of universal tolerance, respect for all religions, and the craving to reconcile the maxims of the Gospel with those of the revolution. These men seek to reconcile Christ and Belial, the Church of God and the state without God. (Pope Leo XIII, Custodi Di Quella Fede, December 8, 1892.)
Naturalism is not of God. The use of natural means will never defeat the devils of this day or any day.
Father Frederick Faber made this exact point in The Precious Blood:
It is plain that some millions of sins in a day are hindered by the Precious Blood; and this is not merely a hindering of so many individual sins, but it is an immense check upon the momentum of sin. It is also a weakening of habits of sin, and a diminution of the consequences of sin. If then, the action of the Precious Blood were withdrawn from the world, sins would not only increase incalculably in number, but the tyranny of sin would be fearfully augmented, and it would spread among a greater number of people. It would wax so bold that no one would be secure from the sins of others. It would be a constant warfare, or an intolerable vigilance, to preserve property and rights. Falsehood would become so universal as to dissolve society; and the homes of domestic life would be turned into wards either of a prison or a madhouse. We cannot be in the company of an atrocious criminal without some feeling of uneasiness and fear. We should not like to be left alone with him, even if his chains were not unfastened. But without the Precious Blood, such men would abound in the world. They might even become the majority. We know of ourselves, from glimpses God has once or twice given us in life, what incredible possibilities of wickedness we have in our souls. Civilization increases these possibilities. Education multiplies and magnifies our powers of sinning. Refinement adds a fresh malignity. Men would thus become more diabolically and unmixedly bad, until at last earth would be a hell on this side of the grave. There would also doubtless be new kinds of sins and worse kinds. Education would provide the novelty, and refinement would carry it into the region of the unnatural. All highly-refined and luxurious developments of heathenism have fearfully illustrated this truth. A wicked barbarian is like a beast. His savage passions are violent but intermitting, and his necessities of sin do not appear to grow. Their circle is limited. But a highly-educated sinner, without the restraints of religion, is like a demon. His sins are less confined to himself. They involve others in their misery. They require others to be offered as it were in sacrifice to them. Moreover, education, considered simply as an intellectual cultivation, propagates sin, and makes it more universal.
The increase of sin, without the prospects which the faith lays open to us, must lead to an increase of despair, and to an increase of it upon a gigantic scale. With despair must come rage, madness, violence, tumult, and bloodshed. Yet from what quarter could we expect relief in this tremendous suffering? We should be imprisoned in our own planet. The blue sky above us would be but a dungeon-roof. The greensward beneath our feet would truly be the slab of our future tomb. Without the Precious Blood there is no intercourse between heaven and earth. Prayer would be useless. Our hapless lot would be irremediable. It has always seemed to me that it will be one of the terrible things in hell, that there are no motives for patience there. We cannot make the best of it. Why should we endure it? Endurance is an effort for a time; but this woe is eternal. Perhaps vicissitudes of agony might be a kind of field for patience. But there are no such vicissitudes. Why should we endure, then? Simply because we must; and yet in eternal things this is not a sort of necessity which supplies a reasonable ground for patience. So in this imaginary world of rampant sin there would be no motives for patience. For death would be our only seeming relief; and that is only seeming, for death is any thin but an eternal sleep. Our impatience would become frenzy; and if our constitutions were strong enough to prevent the frenzy from issuing in downright madness, it would grow into hatred of God, which is perhaps already less uncommon than we suppose.
An earth, from off which all sense of justice had perished, would indeed be the most disconsolate of homes. The antediluvian earth exhibits only a tendency that way; and the same is true of the worst forms of heathenism. The Precious Blood was always there. Unnamed, unknown, and unsuspected, the Blood of Jesus has alleviated every manifestation of evil which there has ever been just as it is alleviating at this hour the punishments of hell. What would be our own individual case on such a blighted earth as this? All our struggles to be better would be simply hopeless. There would be no reason why we should not give ourselves up to that kind of enjoyment which our corruption does substantially find in sin. The gratification of our appetites is something; and that lies on one side, while on the other side there is absolutely nothing. But we should have the worm of conscience already, even though the flames of hell might yet be some years distant. To feel that we are fools, and yet lack the strength to be wiser--is not this precisely the maddening thing in madness? Yet it would be our normal state under the reproaches of conscience, in a world where there was no Precious Blood. Whatever relics of moral good we might retain about us would add most sensibly to our wretchedness. Good people, if there were any, would be, as St. Paul speaks, of all men the most miserable; for they would be drawn away from the enjoyment of this world, or have their enjoyment of it abated by a sense of guilt and shame; and there would be no other world to aim at or to work for. To lessen the intensity of our hell without abridging its eternity would hardly be a cogent motive, when the temptations of sin and the allurements of sense are so vivid and strong.
What sort of love could there be, when we could have no respect? Even if flesh and blood made us love each other, what a separation death would be! We should commit our dead to the ground without a hope. Husband and wife would part with the fearfullest certainties of a reunion more terrible than their separation. Mothers would long to look upon their little ones in the arms of death, because their lot would be less woeful than if they lived to offend God with their developed reason and intelligent will. The sweetest feelings of our nature would become unnatural, and the most honorable ties be dishonored. Our best instincts would lead us into our worst dangers. Our hearts would have to learn to beat another way, in order to avoid the dismal consequences which our affections would bring upon ourselves and others. But it is needless to go further into these harrowing details. The world of the heart, without the Precious Blood, and with an intellectual knowledge of God, and his punishments of sin, is too fearful a picture to be drawn with minute fidelity.
But how would it fare with the poor in such a world? They are God's chosen portion upon the earth. He chose poverty himself, when he came to us. He has left the poor in his place, and they are never to fail from the earth, but to be his representatives there until the doom. But, if it were not for the Precious Blood, would any one love them? Would any one have a devotion to them, and dedicate his life to merciful ingenuities to alleviate their lot? If the stream of almsgiving is so insufficient now, what would it be then? There would be no softening of the heart by grace; there would be no admission of of the obligation to give away in alms a definite portion of our incomes; there would be no desire to expiate sin by munificence to the needy for the love of God. The gospel makes men's hearts large;and yet even under the gospel the fountain of almsgiving flows scantily and uncertainly. There would be no religious orders devoting themselves with skilful concentration to different acts of spiritual and corporal mercy. Vocation is a blossom to be found only in the gardens of the Precious Blood. But all this is only negative, only an absence of God. Matters would go much further in such a world as we are imagining.
Even in countries professing to be Christian, and at least in possession of the knowledge of the gospel, the poor grow to be an intolerable burden to the rich. They have to be supported by compulsory taxes; and they are in other ways a continual subject of irritated and impatient legislation. Nevertheless, it is due to the Precious Blood that the principle of supporting them is acknowledged. From what we read in heathen history--even the history of nations renowned for political wisdom, for philosophical speculation, and for literary and artistic refinement--it would not be extravagant for us to conclude that, if the circumstances of a country were such as to make the numbers of the poor dangerous to the rich, the rich would not scruple to destroy them, while it was yet in their power to do so. Just as men have had in France and England to war down bears and wolves, so would the rich war down the poor, whose clamorous misery and excited despair should threaten them in the enjoyment of their power and their possessions. The numbers of the poor would be thinned by murder, until it should be safe for their masters to reduce them into slavery. The survivors would lead the lives of convicts or of beasts. History, I repeat, shows us that this is by no means an extravagant supposition.
Such would be the condition of the world without the Precious Blood. As generations succeeded each other, original sin would go on developing those inexhaustible malignant powers which come from the almost infinite character of evil. Sin would work earth into hell. Men would become devils, devils to others and to themselves. Every thing which makes life tolerable, which counteracts any evil, which softens any harshness, which sweetens any bitterness, which causes the machinery of society to work smoothly, or which consoles any sadness--is simply due to the Precious Blood of Jesus, in heathen as well as in Christian lands. It changes the whole position of an offending creation to its Creator. It changes, if we may dare in such a matter to speak of chang, the aspect of God's immutable perfections toward his human children. It does not work merely in a spiritual sphere. It is not only prolific in temporal blessings, but it is the veritable cause of all temporal blessings whatsoever. We are all of us every moment sensibly enjoying the benignant influence of the Precious Blood. Yet who thinks of all this? Why is the goodness of God so hidden, so imperceptible, so unsuspected? Perhaps because it is so universal and so excessive, that we should hardly be free agents if it pressed sensibly upon us always. God's goodness is at once the most public of all his attributes, and at the same time the most secret. Has life a sweeter task than to seek it, and to find it out?
Men would be far more happy, if they separated religion less violently from other things. It is both unwise and unloving to put religion into a place by itself, and mark it off with an untrue distinctness from what we call worldly and unspiritual things. Of course there is a distinction, and a most important one, between them; yet it is easy to make this distinction too rigid and to carry it too far. Thus we often attribute to nature what is only due to grace; and we put out of sight the manner and degree in which the blessed majesty of the Incarnation affects all created things. But this mistake is forever robbing us of hundreds of motives for loving Jesus. We know how unspeakably much we owe to him; but we do not see all that it is not much we owe him, but all, simply and absolutely all. We pass through times and places in life, hardly recognizing how the sweetness of Jesus is sweetening the air around us and penetrating natural things with supernatural blessings.
Hence it comes to pass that men make too much of natural goodness. They think too highly of human progress. They exaggerate the moralizing powers of civilization and refinement, which, apart from grace, are simply tyrannies of the few over the many, or of the public over the individual soul. Meanwhile they underrate the corrupting capabilities of sin, and attribute to unassisted nature many excellences which it only catches, as it were by the infection, by the proximity of grace, or by contagion, from the touch of the Church. Even in religious and ecclesiastical matters they incline to measure progress, or test vigor, by other standards rather than that of holiness. These men will consider the foregoing picture of the world without the Precious Blood as overdrawn and too darkly shaded. They do not believe in the intense malignity of man when drifted from God, and still less are they inclined to grant that cultivation and refinement only intensify still further this malignity. They admit the superior excellence of Christian charity; but they also think highly of natural philanthropy. But has this philanthropy ever been found where the indirect influences of the true religion, whether Jewish or Christian, had not penetrated? We may admire the Greeks for their exquisite refinement, and the Romans for the wisdom of their political moderation. Yet look at the position of children, of servants, of slaves, and of the poor, under both these systems, and see if, while extreme refinement only pushed sin to an extremity of foulness, the same exquisite culture did not also lead to a social cruelty and an individual selfishness which mae life unbearable to the masses. Philanthropy is but a theft from the gospel, or rather a shadow, not a substance, and as unhelpful as shadows are want to be. (Father Frederick Faber, The Precious Blood, published originally in England in 1860, republished by TAN Books and Publishers, pp. 53-59.)
Such a world as that described by Father Faber one hundred forty-eight years ago years ago now has come into existence not only because of the forces of Protestantism and Judeo-Masonry. Such a world as that described by Father Faber one hundred forty-eight years ago now has come into existence in no small measure as a result of the the deficit of the Most Precious Blood of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ that is extant as a result of conciliarism's bogus sacraments as we have become the slaves of the state that recognizes not Christ the King while it exalts itself as "god."
Devils of one sort or another will always abound in the corridors of the false opposites of the naturalist "right" and the naturalist "left." We will not drive them out at the ballot box, as I used to believe, at least in part, or by the use of naturalistic or interdenominational or nondenominational means. No, we will help to do our part to drive them out by clinging to true bishops and to true priests in the Catholic catacombs where no concessions are made to conciliarism or to the "legitimacy"of its false shepherds. We will help to do our part to drive them out by spending time in prayer before Our Lord's Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament and praying as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit. We will help to do our part to drive them out by offering up each of our daily prayers and penances and sufferings and humiliations in reparation for our own sins and those of the whole world, giving all we have and do and suffer to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.
Go to the daily offering of the Mass of the ages offered by a true bishop or a true priest. Spend some time on your knees before Our Eucharistic King. Consecrate yourselves totally to Our Lord through His Most Blessed Mother's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart, and tell Him that a fellow sinner, a terrible sinner who has much in his life to make reparation for before he dies, sent you His way through His Most Blessed Mother to be a champion of Christ the King and of Mary our Immaculate Queen.
Vivat Christus Rex!
Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?
Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.
