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Show SIXTH INTERESTING LETTER Shocking Spectacles Witnessed in French Playhouses Art Galleries Designed to Arouse Animal Passions Canon Sullivan's Sulli-van's Theory of Demoniacal Possession in Explaining Madness of Revolutionists Revolution-ists and Communes Real Cause Emotional Emo-tional Insanity Caused by Decay of Faith Morals The Army and Navy Deprived De-prived of All Religious Influence What St. Paul Says of Nations That Deny God and His Providence End of the Struggle Strug-gle Truth and Justice Will Prevail To the Editor : Sir: I will not inflict upon your readers, after my letter last week, any extended description of the. degradation of art in France, pictorial, descriptive and dramatic. If the higher stage be corrupt, a- I think you will agree with me that it is. and shockingly shock-ingly so. what must be the condition of the theatres, f the vaudeville houses, the continuous performances. ! the free-and-easies and the cafe's chautants. which 1 cater nightly to the so-called lower orders? In my i time in Paris the lardin Mabille v$as one of the most fashionable and dangerous places of amuse- I ment in the great city. Here was to be seen every night that lascivious invention of a possessed mind, J the can-can. At the Maulin Rouge they put on the i "muscle-dance" with a sextette of "little Egypts'' and at the Folic Bergere they nightly gave exhibi- , tions of th?t four Cairo immorality, the "Couche- f Couchee." The art galleries of the populous cities i of France are the proximate occasions of sin to J thousands. Here, executed with diabolic skill, are I paintings in the nude of male anj, femnlo forms I a 7d-r-every eopf-eivable-pose' anTT 'rrttude. Why. ' -Tl eien in the Louvre, where are housed many of the j greatest works of art of the world, the premiere I salle. the first, room you enter, shocks one's sense j of morality with a presentation of David's heroic I crayons and free hand drawings in the nude. I Through the galleries of art, so called, a contiu- j nous procession of young men and women, of boys j and girls from Europe and from X'orth and South I America is moving, and they would not be human I : if they were not passionately disturbed by what t ; they see. If the curio, art and stationary shops on I the Rue Rivoli. Boulevard St. Michel and in every j quarter of Taris, photographs and mezzo-tints of I the nude paint:ngs of the Luxembourg. Palais ' j Royal and the liouvre are exhibited ami for .-ale. But let us have an end of this unpleasant subject. Last evening at my hotel I made the accpiainr-ance accpiainr-ance of an Irish priest. Canon Sullivan, who. after thirty years spent in parochial work. wa.s making his first visit to America. Father Sullivan, wh was a master in metaphysics and theology, held, when discussing with me the present deplorable condition of affairs in France, to the theory of demoniacal possession. He contended that human nature of itself was only accidentally and not es- sentially corrupt, and that only on the assumption f of diabolic possession was it possible to explain' any of the great apostasies of the human race, be- ginning with the apostasy of the Dispersion and I acting intermittently down to the present age. "How may you otherwise explain." he continued, "the wild revolutionary madness of the rFench people peo-ple in the social upheaval of 170. and the wild, ungovernable fury then everywhere witnessed in France ( The masses were possessed, thoi were . whirled aloft, were driven hither ami thither and' onward in the terrible work of demolition by a mysterious mys-terious power they did not comprehend and by a force they were unable, having once yielded to it. to resist. The same phenomenon, only on a reduced re-duced scale, was observable in the revolution of ISIS. Everywhere there seemed to be an invisible power at work. Then, remember what transpired during the Commune in 1ST1. when five hundred j thousand people were possessed with a demon of destruction, with insatiable fury and the madness of crime. There were in the ranks of the Communists Com-munists men of high intelligence, of humane feelings, feel-ings, men whose studies, professions, interests, and. let me add. convictions, antecedents and tendencies placed them in the category of conservatism, law and order, who were carried away by an invisible force, became incarnate Hends and hurled the brand of the incendiary at temple, palace and cathedral, and even at their own homes which sheltered them and their families, as if it was not they whodid it, but a foreign spirit that compelled them. I could not altogether agree with the Canon, nor see the application of his opinion to the present social and religious upheaval in France. The gentile apos-. tasv or falling away of the nations from the pnmi- tive or patriarchal religion, if it did not happen be- , j fore language was confounded at Babel or the dis- ! perslon of mankind took place, naturally followed. . when unity of speech was lost and with it unity ot ideas and of faith. Each fraction of the nation be- , l came a tribe, took its own course and developed a ; ( tribal or national religion of its own. In the case , I of the excesses of the French Revolution and those I of the Commune. I believe they were caused by emo- I tional insanity rsulting from the voluntary decom- , ' posing of individual and national faith and morals. , j When men begin to think they know more than j I their Creator they are in a bad state. The govern- - j ment of France for the past hundred years is. con- I sciouslv or unconscioosdy in league with Satan to ! j destroy faith in God as the creator of the world and j Continued on Page 5. '; f SIXTH INTERESTING LETTER Continued from Page 1. rf man. This I believe, and I think the facts of , contemporary history will bear me out. Wlvn I was in France, for instance, in 1871. divine rot vice I was held in the presence of thf troops every Sun- I day and Holy day.' This imposing and impressive; I acknowledgment of tho existence of God end ihe I duty owed to him by man has long since hern doyo I away with and now, a soldier, under arms in the j 1 French army may not oven enter n church to .isViil I I at a wedding- or a funeral. The American or ihe 1 I British .commissioned and non-commissioned off i- I I per may not enter a saloon in uniform; in France ! he may patronise a cafe or a buffet, but ho inust i vot enter a church to ay hh iryT i" juilitery. I I " - A v' . ' r s- " i - dress. The navy, however, until the coming int.) office of M. do Laussan, the late minister of marine, ma-rine, retained all its ancient relig-ious customs and ceremonies. M. Laussan abolished the commemoration commemora-tion of Good Friday, observed by the sailors and marines, and did away with navy chaplains, so that today the French army and navy are about as nagan ns those of the Chinese. j like manner ihe poi-miusioii poi-miusioii formerly an obligation to hear mass on Sundays has been refused to the Lyce. s, military and naval colleges, hospitals, charitable Institution and prisons. Just think it over, about the hospitals, state charitable institutions and prisons. The historic and picturesque Messe Rouge anmndly celebrated at the opening of the assizes, has been lone away with, not at the request of the judges find barristers, but by the will of the Radical majority. ma-jority. I cannot, within the pormissnble limit of a weekly paper, enter into further details, but let it be understood, once for all, that a party in power opeidy opposed to Christianity has n trem nu-.u leverage, and especially when jt has ih.- Mipp,.rt of the majority of the nation. Saint Paul in iiis groit letter or encyclical to the Roman c inverts f iii time, would take no excuse from a natii-i that. closed its eyes to the existence of God -md his overruling- providence. His denunciations e.iver the. French nation today. Apply ihe fitness yours. -If here are his words: "For the wrath of God is n-vealod n-vealod from heaven against all iinpi-ty and injustice injus-tice of these men that detain the trnth of God. Bt cause that which is known of God is maniiVs:- ia them. For God hath manifested it to 'hvni. F--t the invisible things of Him from the creation o..-the o..-the world are clearly seen, being- understood by the things that are made; His eternal power als and divinity; so that they are inejccusahlc-. AYherefore God delivered them over to the desires of their hearts, to -uncleanEness- to dihon thei.' own bodies among themselves, who changed the trnih of God inio a lie, and worshipped and .-erve d the creature Tather than the CrtaRl-ctn. who 'Is blessed forever." (Roin. l:li'a.) You ask me, what will be the end. The endi? "Why. truth must triumph at the la.-t. Though 'round and 'round we run; For the right at last conies uppermost. And ever is justice done." For ripht is right and God is God. And God the day must win. , To doubt would be disloyalt To falter would be sin. The historic church of God has survived the ruthless vengeance of persecuting Jew and Pagan, she has survived tho defection of England and Scotland and nearly all northwestern Europe in the sixteenth century, and .the power and ci-aft of royal tyrants who sought to destroy or enslave brr. and is today the only religion that advances by personal per-sonal conviction and conversion. The church v-tered v-tered the sphere of life at a time of unparalleled wickedness. It is extremely difficult to know to what deeper depths of infamies it was possible for a cultured people to sink than that to which the Roman people had fallen when the faith of Christ and Him crucified challenged a world wallowing in the slime of its own sins and satiated with the enormity enor-mity of its sensual indulgence. " Ineed but make, says Farrar. a passing allusion to its enormous wealth; its unbounded self-indulgence; its greedy avarice; its apathy, debauchery and cruelty; its hopeless fatalism; its unspeakable sadness and weariness ;its strange extravagancies alike of infidelity infi-delity and superstition." Two phases sum up the characteristics of Roman civilization in the days of the empire heartless cruelty ami unfathomable corruption. It was before, the once crave and pure minded senators of Rome the greatness of whose state was founded on the sanctity of family relationship rela-tionship that the Censor Metellus had been declared de-clared that marriage could only be regarded as an intolerable necessity. Before the same senate, at an earlier period, a leading member had not scrup-pled scrup-pled to assert that there was scarcely one among them all who had not ordered one or more of his infant in-fant children to be exposed to death. In the hearing hear-ing of the, same senate in A. D. oi), not long before St. Paul wrote his letter to the Romans, Casius Longimis had gravely argued that the only security for the life of masters was to carry out the sanguinary san-guinary Silnnian law, that if a master was murdered mur-dered by a slave everyone of his slaves, however notoriously no-toriously innocent, should be indiscriminately massacred. mas-sacred. It was the senators of Rome who thronged forth to meet with a daring congratulations the miserable youth the. newly proclaimed emperor who came to them with his hands reekiug with the blood of his mother. They offered thanksgiving to the gods for his shocking cruelties and immediately immediate-ly offered divine honors to the dead infant, four months old. of his wife whom he afterwards killed with a brutal kick. A church that has grappled with this monster of iniquity the Roman empire in its own den and subdued and tamed it, must be divine and has nothing to fear from any man or aggregation of men on earth. And now. sir. let me bring to an end this series of letters with a remarkable re-markable and in a sense prophetic utterance from MeCauley's Review of Ranke's "History of ihe Popes." It is an extraordinary appreciation of the i vitality and divine perpetuity of the church from the pen of one of the greatest British Celts of modern mod-ern times. "There is not and there never waa on earth an institutir.r. sn well deserving of examination aa the Roman Catholic church. It joins together the two greai cgtw of civilization. Xo other institution in left htaudintf which carries the miud back to the lime whor. tho fenoke of Hacritice rose from the Pantheon and whr.a leopards and tigers bounded in fur; Flavian u jipitiieater. The proudent royal houses jire bu.' nf ytsuirday when compared with ihe line . of ihe supreme Pontiffs, The Catholic church U still sending forth to the furthest ends of the world missionaries, as zeal as those who landed in Fug-laud Fug-laud with Auiruiitine, jThe number of her children ( is greater now than in any former age. Her spiritual spirit-ual ascendancy extends over vast territories, nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long duration is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world, and Ave feel no assuranc that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and repected before th Saxon had set forth in Hrit-ain, Hrit-ain, before the Frank had crossed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence flourished at Antioeh. when idols were still worshiped in the temple of Mecca 'and she may still exist in undiminished vigor, when some traveler from N'ew Zealand shall in the midst of a vast solitude take his stand on a broken arc'; of London bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul." HUBERT LARK IX. Xote to the Editor: If am lu,t pressed too closely for time 1 will mail you from Chicago, bo-fore bo-fore leaving for the Atlantic seaboard, a contriliu-; tioit dealing with the so-inl and relicious life of our own republic. These letters are now yours f. use in any way or for any .purpose you deem he.-t. .May you and the Inter-Mountain Catholic haw a long and prosperous life. II. J.. |