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Show TIMELY WARNING TO CHRISTIANS. Pope Pius N., not unexpectedly and quite naturally, nat-urally, is troubled lest the wave of materialism that is sweeping the globe and that has beaten largely in vain against the adamantiilt ramparts of the church, erumbtle the foundations. Catholics generally gen-erally and Christians of every denomination and communion may well lend ear to the pontiff's warning. warn-ing. He observes that "modernism is a most serious seri-ous danger to the church;" and therein he sums up at, a stroke of the pen the menace of the situation. The Holy Father of the Catholic communion perceives more cll-arly perhaps, than we can on this side the dangers that lurk in the ath of religion. Just without the entrance of the Vatican seethes a gathering maelstrom of atheism and doubt, a religion reli-gion of free love, license and sedition that would strike down, if it could, at one fell stroke the repression re-pression of human passion and the reverence for the Deity the church has been centuries creating, and turn the world into a bedlam of conflicting cults and isms and a fiery furnace of unbridled lust, rapine and murder. To those who think, the Pope's encyclical can be expressed within no narrow bounds of creed. Bigotry and hatred must vanish before tc on-spread on-spread of a "modernism" that threatens, not merely the Catholic church, but every altar and every pulpit. pul-pit. The misguided followers of the most rabid of European free-thinkers, .who to some extent have invaded this country, would sack the places Christians Chris-tians revere as speedily as they would look at them. Men of every creed will join in congratidating Catholics upon the encyclical, as emanating from a man standing fearless at the head of a fearless organization, having like other organizations its faults and foibles in the human make-up; but designed, de-signed, and as we conceive destined, to be the eventual event-ual source of uplift for mankind. They must recognize rec-ognize that a blow to the Catholic church is a blow-to blow-to them, and that upon its perpetuity must rest their own refugse. No small amount of courage is required, in these days, to be a Pope. Pius X., for this encyclical, encyc-lical, bids fair to take his place in pontifical history his-tory as one of the most courageous. He adheres grandly to the grand old conception that the church, being God-made, cannot fall. And this is the faith to which Christians of all apfes have clung steadfastly. Cornell (N. Y.) Daily Times. |