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Show RELIGI02T! ITS CBIGHT AND TRUTH THE MEASURE OF MAN'S HAPPINESS. God was, is, and ever shall be. He had no beginning. Man is and ever Fhall be, but had a beginning in time. Time, marking the order in which events succeed, future as well as past events, cannot be applied to God. Time, as applied to man, is twofold, past and. future. On the side of God there is no past, no future. For man, memory is the faculty which brings up past events. It recalls what has transpired within the range of its own experience, exper-ience, or from acquired knowledge. But this faculty may and does perceive the future as well as the jast, since man can look before as well as after. This foresight, extending with the unending future, would reasonably presuppose pre-suppose a relationship between God and man. , God ever existing, a necessary neces-sary cause, and man beginning in time, the effect of the creative act must be bound together toy some link. The bond which unites both is religion. In its broadest sense religion may be defined as an acknowledgement and worship wor-ship of the Deity. It deiines the relations which unite the creature to the Creator, and points out the truths which join finite man to the Infinite and Eternal Being. Religion is coeval and co-existant with the history of man. Its existence could not, as modern theorists represent it, be a mere fact of man's natural history, as rumination is a fact of the natural history of the cow. This would be making religion entirely dependent on a sentiment, which is natural to man, therefore purely human, and lacking the divine origin which it claims. Man could not invent a religion unless religion existed prior to the invention, any more than he could invent a language without having another language to build on. To suppose that the Christian religion is a development of heathen mythologies, mythol-ogies, as some infidel writers maintain, js to contradict well known facts, or set aside the historical value of the meet ancient records. The old-t historical histor-ical document we now have is the Hebrew book of Generis. Christianity, as . taught by the Catholic Church for the past nineteen centuries will be found within its pages, differing only in this, that the patriarchs believed in th Messiah who was to come, whilst the Church believes in the same. Messiah the Christ who has come, and who, as St. Paul teaches, "did the things necessary nec-essary to perfect their faith. It was the religion of Adam and his posterity, before and after-ahe deluge, till the erection of the Tower of Bab because of the confusion of tongues, had ceased, and the great Gentile aposracy had taken idace. The most ancient heathen mythology is long subsequent to the flood, and ocfuld not have the germs of Christianity. The primitive religion revealed by God must have been true. It recognized God in Hi true character; char-acter; also the true relation of man to Him. The mythologies and gross superstitions su-perstitions which came subsequently were conductions of the original truths and divine traditions first implanted in the hearts of our ancestors. Man may can, and often dote corrupt, and falsify the true faith; but he could rot originate orig-inate even a false religion, unless reli-ion had already existed. Man growing up devoid of all religion and never hearing of the divine could not, by any inward sentiment, conceive an ( idea of something divine superior and distinct from himself. Those who worshiped gods, made and fashioned by their own hands,- first believed that God is, and should be worship-l, otherwise how could they identify Ilim with the sun and moon, or any other elementary forces of nature? Error presupposes truth, as denial presupposes an affirmation. So nUo with false religions; they presuppose, and are subsequent to t-ue re'l-ion True religion gives the grandest and most sublime idea of man in his rela tions to trfxi. called out of nothingness by God's creative power, he longs to return to Him with confident hope of one day possessing infinite happiness More, still, religion fortifies man, and in the battle "bf life renders him invincible. in-vincible. "A man who fears not GoL" wrote Aristotle, "la not a man of courage, cour-age, but infirm of ?oul, for just as he is not courageous who fears everything so neither is lie courageous who fears nothing, not even the Divinity " Bereft of religion, the moat successful life Is a failure in the end. Money cannot be transplanted on the other side of the grave; pleasures fade away like flowers in the early autumn, and man, in his .seventies, who enjoyed both, can only say: I am 75 years old, and nothing is left me but death. Death without re ligion brings a piercing chill. Such a Person Byron describes as 'a poor shipwrecked ship-wrecked sailor, at the menrcy of the urging billows, and whose only food is the hard and pitiless rocks; or, as a wretched wanderer, lost in a boundless and arid desert, who has the sand for his only sustenance. What solace for th poor, miserable man who has no light to steer him to his last goal He can only cry out: "I am indeed unhappy; I havo'lest God, and have no hope even here below." But for the man with strong faith, death is strapped of all its terrors. Between religion and death there exists an harmonious relation-ship. relation-ship. The former looks at the latter, not as the end, but the beginnin- of life the gate through which we pass from this transitory world, where there are so many woes and crosses, to that happy home where all is splendor and th measure of man's happiness is complete by nfinite Love. ' |