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Show ; 't , PASTORAL LETTER. . : ; . . . j J lie approach of the great least of Christmas, i s ; .commemorating the birlh of our Lord and Savior f 1 Jesus Christ and the sacred union of the Second ! ' . , . ' lerson of the Adorable Trinitv with our humanity, if' i . I i imjiels ine to invoke upon those subject to my charge the blessing' of God. the peace of the Lord i i and the happiness of elect souls. From my inmost I I ' lieart I invoke upon all the blessing called down I bv the llieh Priest, Aaron, on the tribes of Israel: i I ' ! "The -Lord bless you and keep you in his care; I the Lord show His face to you and have mercy on j ! you; i j "The Iord show His countenance to you and i j r ' give ou peace." Num. 24-26. I j j I I deem it 1o be my duty in these perilous times. i when so many around us "have made shipwreck of j f , he faith" and "fulfilling the will of the flesh and ; .not of God," are "walking after their own lusts I j and pleasures," to encourage you in the language I of St. Taul to Timothy, ''Hold fast the form of sound words which you have heard from me in ! I faith and in love which is in Jesus Christ." ' " We are living in a century and in a land from j : f which apostolic Christianity is disaiearing, and j ' I. where, outside the Catholic Church. Jesus Christ t i j if and the Won! of God are not now preached in i ' the temples of worship. St. Paul, in his Epistle i : to the Corinthians and in his pastoral letters, ' j makes it abundantly clear rliat the pulpit through ; all ages should stand for "Christ and Him cruci- ' fied." "Christ is preached," writes St. Paul .to ! "' . ! the Phillipians, "and therein do 1 rejoice." "We ; , s preach not ourselves,'.' he. again exclaims, "but Christ J.esus." "And daily in the temple and in s every house." writes St. Luke, "they (the disci- I ; j ; pies) ceased not to teach and preach Jesus Christ." r ' : 1 Acts v, 42. "I charge thee," writes the aged apos- " tie to his .spiritual son, Timothy, "I charge thee before God and Jesus Christ, who shall judge the . living and the dead, by his coming and his king- s ; dom, j)rcach the, word, be instant in season and out I j of season, reprove, rebuke, exhort with all patience i j and doctrine. For the" time will come when they I I will not bear sound doctrine; 'but according to I j their own desires they will heap to themselves f . I teachers rt"tor their own lusts.'' I , I This prophetic languago of the apostle to the j j Gentiles bears forcibly on conditions as they exist I i today, on the impatience of the multitude with I f j sound doctrine 'and on the deplorable attitude of ! the pulpit in the presence of eminent danger. St. I i Paid remiiTds Timothy, and through him the I church, that a time will come it is here now I ! when men will listen only to such teaching, and accept, such doctrine, as please themselves doc- f trines that will not oppose their individual opin- I ion.' nor comlemn their sins, nor threaten punish- ; . ! mont in the life beyond the grave, j ; If we apply the language of St. Paul to con- j 1 I ditiens as they are today in the religious and moral I ! - life around us. we do that life no injustice. It ! i ; certainly is not doing any violence to the state of I : religious thought and the itiable departure of the non-Catholic pulpit from sound teaching, to say 4 i that both conditions are actually described by the i ; apostle in ihe letter he wrote to the Bishop of I Ephesus. Indeed, if he were writing from any of our own life centers he would not need to change f ' & sentence. ' , The pulpit of modern heresy is today perverted into a secular platform, and from it the divinity of Jesus Christ, death, judgment and eternal pun u ishment for shameful sin and crime are no longer i ; taught. For the doctrines of Christianity and i the-supreme revelations of God to our race, the i't modern pulpit is feeding its hearers en a diet of II pure secularism and sensationalism. !j ' , And that we may not be charged with unfair- ness or misrepresentation, we submit the titles of If so-called sermons delivered from the pulpits of sectarian churches, and recorded in our Alonday ; ; morning newspapers from time to time. The preachers ordained to teach the doctrine of Jesus Christ took for their subjects on different Sundays; "Universal Force.' "The Industrial Problem." "The Measure of Our Selfhood." "The Touch of Red." "Keep Your Windows Open.' On a particular par-ticular Sunday, in out? of our eitiw, tenuous yere delivered not long- ao on; "An Ideal lipcord." "Our Centennial Time." "How to Become Master of Our Fate.' "The World's Greatest Pictures." 'Will Bread Sustain LifeJ" "Silencing n Pro-phet,n Pro-phet,n "Applied Wisdom." "A Young Mans Glory." "A Possibility." "The Demon Back Again." And on other secular nd sensational subjects, proving a Avidespread pulpit apostasy and the decomposition of Christianity outside the Catholic Church. The fundamental doctrines of Christianity, "The Incarnation," "The Resurrection," "The As- tension," "The Descent of the Jloly Ghost," "The Judgment to Come," "The Immortality of the Soul," "The Life Beyond the Grave," are no longer long-er taught from so-called Christian pulpits. Either the people will no longer listen to them, or the preachers do not believe them. If the spectacle were not so pathetic and deeply pitiful, we would be tempted to say that the Christian religion, as taught to the people today, is the greatest sham and comedy ever inflicted upon a patient public. . As a result of this apostasy of the pulpit, the Christian family and organized society are decomposing. decom-posing. It is impossible for the thoughtful or the observant man, who is solicitous for his brother's . soul, not to perceive the corrosion which is eating into the moral and religious life of the family, nor can he fail to observe the awful effects of the disintegration dis-integration of home life. Christianity, under God, depends for its growth, vitality and perpetuity on the family, which ought to be the foundation of the spiritual edifice, the kingdom of God upon earth. The father, mother and children, which we call the family, arc sacramental units of what .St. Paul terms "a great mystery." Where the family, dwell together is called by the endearing name of "Home," and there is no home so humble that it may not become the reflection re-flection of the purchased possession of .Him for whom the communion of saints is named. Xo amount of schooling, no religious instruction from the best teachers, and in the best atmosphere, can overcome the baneful influence of an evil home or a home where the name of God is. never reverently mentioned or a prayer never heard. With the parents God has lodged the authority and p laced the responsibility of moulding the soul of the child in a pattern of religion and morality. With them rest the commission to "bring up a child in the way he should go," and if they prove unfaithful to the charge, a woe is pronounced upon them. If the parents be worldly, selfish, self-seeking and irreverent, if the home be a place where no prayer is ever heard, where religion and the practices prac-tices of religion are not taught, the sons and daughters, daugh-ters, if there be any, cannot rise above the parental level, and must in time by an inexorable law of decay, descend lower than the father and mother. Indications are on the surface of society that the tide of personal and public morality is on the ebb among us invpife of the material progress of the times and the ouTward decency of which we boast so loudly. Without descending to minute details, the general gen-eral symptoms of degeneracy are sufficiently obvious: ob-vious: First, in a loss of almost all care for the life to come and the responsibilities attaching to it; this is manifest in a prevailing irreverence, rude manners, loss of the fear of God, and in the young a noticeable tendency to lewdness, contempt for authority and an absence of reverence for. and deference to the aged. Second, that to make money is the great, .indeed .in-deed the only, aim of life, and that education v is valuable in so far as it contributes to this end. Third, that the duty of a man and his ultimate end is not to "know, love and servo God on earth and to enjoy Him forever," but to serve ourselves and enjoy life, or, in the language of the Roman heathen. "Let us eat and drink today, for tomorrow tomor-row we die." These sentiments and principles, in their application ap-plication to daily life, are working havoc in society so-ciety and are paganizing families that ought to be Christian and are not. Xow, while ihe family is, humanly speaking, the foundation and the life of Christianity, it is the very corner stone of the state. and the disruption of ihe state is as certain to follow the disruption of the family as that day should follow night. The most marvelous material progress of a people, the most boundlcfs wealth of a nation, will prove little better as a preventive against national' decay than a barrier of sand against the swelling of the sea, where the home is neglected and family life has been destroyed. And that family life is being destroyed we know from the torrents of pollution openly pouring in and out through the doors of the divorce courts, at once the cause and effect of its own degradation. degrada-tion. According to figures given out by the census department, in the twenty years from 1887 to 190G, inclusive, there were 945.025 divorces granted in our country. This is a black and shameful record. It is difficult to understand or to realize what this awful, record of almost a million of ruined homes means. If the unalterable Catholic Church did not stand as" an impregnable rock against this appalling appall-ing tide of divorce, marriage would be threatened in the United States with a descent to promiscuous ' license. Without going into detail, it may be safely said that the present state of society around us is strongly marked by irreverence and immorality immor-ality in the young; abhorrence of authority, sensual sen-sual indulgence and contempt for the sanctity of human life among many of the full-grown. This deplorable state of our domestic and moral life is but the natural effect of a decay of faitln When, even by ministers in the pulpit and professors in the chair of learning, the union of the divine and human natures in the persons of our Incarnate Lord is treated as a myth, and the doctrine doc-trine of the most holy Trinity denounced ns a corruption, cor-ruption, what can we hope for from the masses? Xow, nil this follows from a rejection of the authority of the Church the body founded by our Lord, organized by His apostles, and perpetuated under the same form of government by their successors, suc-cessors, as a witness either to what doctrines were held from the beginning, or what interpretation of Holy Scriptures was universally received by her members. It is a dream of fanaticism, a delusion of undisciplined un-disciplined minds, to talk of a law-abiding and moral people, when we have neglected to train them in the divinely appointed season of childhood. child-hood. Teach them to serve God. for it is as true' now as in the time of Isaiah, "The nation and people peo-ple that will not serve Thee. oh. God. shall perish; and the Gentiles shall be wasted with desolation. Is. Ix, 12. L. SCAXLAX, Bishop of Salt Lake. |
