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Show FOURTH INTERESTING LETTER j Religious Apostasy Caused by Political and Social Corruption The Masses Led by a Few Not the Real Government of France Fickle Fortune Their God The Morals of the French Youth Obliterated Oblit-erated by Immoral Art and Literature ' Loss of Virtue Leads to the Extinction of a Race Pretended Science Which Tries to Undermine Faith Equal to Murder Those Held Responsible for the Army of Free Thinkers and Atheists in France. (Written fur The Intcrnmuiitain Catholic) To The Editor: Sir. Bear with me if I i 1 1 i 1 i t upon your readers read-ers a moralizing preface to this letter before f. wade into the depths if my subject. Reasons for the Decay of Faith in .France. The history of the Apostate nations before and immediately after the Redemption is a history of political and social corruption, cor-ruption, of increasing blasphemy, lawlessness and deterioration: it is a record of the progress of tyranny and oppression on the part of rulers and people, of moral and religious degradation. The history of modern France is the exact counterpart, of tlnit of any of the Gentile nations before the Christian era, and of that all-conquering empire, Rome, when leaning to her fall. The French nation na-tion is every day losing sight of the divine moral order, and of divine government iu human affairs. It excludes God from the government of the republic, re-public, and, as Rome in its decline made the "vox populi. vox dei'' the will of the people, the will of God the French government makes the majority supreme and independent. It says to the people, "Whosoever would be saved above all thin 7 it. i necessary that he hold the Radical faith AJd the Radical faith is this: Justice is justi(-(ec)iiise the majority so declare it. And if the majority at' firm W thing today. "r.LatTs'fTsh?; 'and' if tha jtu--'1 ' jority.a-'st'ifiii .the Oi.-p-..-ii e tomorrow, that riiv." " The masses worship Fortune as the supreme god- dess, and regard success as the test of merit. But are the masses in fault T do not think so. The masses everywhere are like dumb, driven cattle cat-tle and do not or cannot think for themselves. You tell me this is a heresy against human intelligence. Well, listen to this; "Montgomery. Alabama, Jan. 14. B. B. Comer wa-? today inaugurated Governor of Alabama. The ceremonies were witnessed by a crowd of 20,000 poonle. many of whom came in wagons twenty and thirty miles."' You see, human' nature is at bottom very much the same the world over. Two thousand ye;ys ago the Judeans ''came out to see a reed shaken by the wind;" today the Alabamans come out to see a man take an oath of office. There .is no such thing' as majority rule. The majority is always governed by the minority' within it. which persuades the majority it is good for it to do this or not to do that. Radical France boasts of its progress in literature litera-ture and art. in the sciences and in applied mechanics, me-chanics, but in religion and iu that which constitutes consti-tutes the basis of society she is losing and reducing reduc-ing herself to utter nakedness. Compared with other nations around her she is decreasing iu population pop-ulation and there is taking place in her population a degeneration of the physical man calculated t alarm the patriot and the statesman. The cause iu the loss of religious faith, iu the hick of mora) and religious instruction, in the- spread of mater-' ialism and the rejection of supernatural - grace, without which a nation or an individual cannot be sustained in its integrity. For the faith which she has rejected she encourages the growth of luxury and makes material goods and sensible pleasures, the end and aim of life. It is a bad sign and there is something morally-wrong morally-wrong where prizes need to be offered, as in France-today, France-today, to induce the young to marry and to induce the married to suffer their children to be born and -raised. A race, unlike an indiyidual, ought not. to grow (dd. Like the imperishable Church of God it ought to be "ever ancient and ever new." and retain its strength for all time. A race lives by its principles and its virtues. They constitute its life, its virility, its strength and its perpetual vitality. Its principles or fundamental rules of truth are from God; its virtues am the wisdom, mode of life and the application of these rules to individual life and energized in the people, ira-terial ira-terial development, mechanical invention and commercial com-mercial expansion no more constitute the happiness and permanency of a nation than do physical strength and beauty the honor or the longevity of the individual. The soul is the stature of the man and that which makes for the life of the individual soul makes for the life of the race, and conversely what tends to degrade the soul tends to degrade and destroy the race. But to come back to our subject, the reasons for the decline of fai'h in Fra nee. That greatest of American philosophers and -master of dialectics. Orestes A. Brownson. forty years ago compared Darwin. Huxley. Spencer Buchner and Taine. to murderers, for "by then-false then-false opinions, theories and hypotheses, they unsettle un-settle men's minds, bewilder the half-learned! mislead mis-lead the ignorant, undermine the very foundations, of society and assail the whole moral order of the Universe, They are fearfully guilty and a thou-'' ' sand time more dangerous to society than the inost noted thieves, robbers, swindlers, murderers and midnight assasins. They should be branded: Continued on. Page 5 ' 1 i FOURTH INTERESTING LETT ER. Continued from Page 1. with infamy rfs the enemies of God and man. tor j-eligion and society, of truth and justice, of science sci-ence anil civili.Hlion." The writings of these men, however, can only reach the masses by filtration through magazines ami newspapers. Their language, lan-guage, style and technical phrases lift them into a higher plane than that occupied by the literature of the people. The French infidel and pornographic porno-graphic or lascivious writers have descended to ihe level of the intelligence of the masses, and in language lan-guage as blasphemous as it is indecent have enfeebled en-feebled the faith and excited the nerves of the youth of their own laud. By abominable calumnies j on the priesthood, by sophisms against religion, as plausible as they are dangerous, by the glamour of fascination which they throw over the sexual sin and the classification of faith with hypocrifs, old women and feeble minds, they break down all the living forces of the soul and leave it inert, trembling and submissive. To seductive argument they add the charm of an attractive style, and once he victim permits himself to travel across Ihe first and secoud chapters of one of their books he continues to the end and often to his ruin. Voltaire, Vol-taire, the two llousseaus. Diderot. .Do Holbach. Taine and the Encyclopedists have blazed the path for the army of free-thinkers, atheists rind rationalists ration-alists who for one hundred years have been corrupting cor-rupting the faith of Frenchmen. From the writings of these vandals Thomas Paine got his material for his "Rights of Man" and "Age of Beason," and Kobert Ingersol his objections to the Pentateuch objections which ho modernized lor his - audiences audi-ences in his lectures, and condensed for his readers in his "Mistakes of Moses."' While ihese intellectual intel-lectual sappers were undermining the foundations of faith a less able but a more literary and polished army of writers led by George Sands. Paul Le (oc. Eugene Sue and the Count de Saint Priest, was making war on the chastity of young men and the inviolate purity' of French maidens. The shelves of the circulating libraries of France are liberally supplied with works attacking Christian faith and with vile books reeking with suggest iveness and lasciviousness. Would any father in America who values his daughters chastity, his wife's purity or the honor of his household, tolerate in his home the trilology of Zola, his Borne. Paris, Loimles; the "Gad-fly" of Paul Moreau. who glorifies with an aureole of intense admiration the unlawful indulgence indul-gence of the sexual sense, or the writings of The-ophilus The-ophilus Guiltier, who, turning from what he calls the cold charity of the Blessed Virgin, throws himself him-self into the arms of Venus Anadyoniene, the goddess god-dess of impure love: "Mary," he exclaims, ''with her transparent chastity, her cheeks shaded with sober virginal colour, is a deal too haughty for me. 1 love Venus better, better a thousand times. Venus comes from the sea to take possession of the world, as a goddess we love should, quite naked and quite alone. The Christ has enveloped the whole world in a winding-sheet Oh. purity, plant of bitterness, born on a blood-soaked soil, and whose degenerate and sickly blossom expands in the dark shade of cloisters, under a chill baptismal rain. Purity, mysticism, melancholy, three new maladies brought into our life by Christ! For me, I look on woman iu the old world manner, like a, fair sl-ive, made only for our pleasure."' I have eliminated from this extract erotic references ref-erences and whole sentences as disgraceful to literature liter-ature a? ihey are offensive to Christian morals. Ten thousand copies of the book from which I quote were sold in Paris alone in one week. And yet we wonder why Paris is so corrupt. There is not a public library in all Franee whose fiction department de-partment is not filled with books? of this kind, and of a literary polish scarcely inferior. On the shelves of these libraries are the works of native and foreign for-eign authors reeking with arguments and blasphemies blasphe-mies against the Christian religion, and from which magazine and newspaper writers draw their ammunition for their war on Christianity. Five and ten-cent editions of these shameful productions, produc-tions, with flaring paper covers, arc for sale in all cheap bookstores of the workingmen's quarters in Paris. When, a few years ago, I passed a couple of weeks in the city, revisiting dear, familiar scenes. and among them the Church of the Saere. Heart, the 'Tempfc of Expiation." erected on M mtmar-tyre, mtmar-tyre, to atone for the slaughter of the Ar. hbishop and his priests by the Communists. After leaving Ihe church I passed through the Rue Bri-1 -Niche, one end of which leads into the line Sain Merry. Where the two streets meet there is a lit'jle bookstore. book-store. Here the daily papers and ihe. late.-t magazines maga-zines and illustrated papers are for sale. Exposed in the window, scattered on the counter aid arranged ar-ranged on the shelves were cheap prints of ihe latest lat-est novel and early romances. After pnr .-basing a magazine 1 got into friendly eonwrsati n with the lessee of the stall. "What class of pe .pie." I asked him. "are your best customers;" "Y ell." In replied, 'chiefly shop girls, seamstresses, errand boys and youmr workiegmeu." lie seenn I to be quite unconscious, -or perhaps did not care, .that lie was selling to these young boys and girle nioi shameful and vile books attacking. rcli,ijon and morality. Like Marie ( -orelli, the ambinoij of the French second-ela-s writer is to Iwve his vork on the Index Expurgatorius that is. to be condemned by Rome, satisfied that the condemnation will help to sell his book. These authors are weavers of corruption cor-ruption who lake Hie threads of the emotions, sensations sen-sations aiid feelings of the young and inexperienced, inexperi-enced, and from the looms of their own lascivious imaginations weave on rh:- minds of their unconscious uncon-scious victims a tapestry of evil thoughts and inflamed in-flamed desires. Over the while soul redeemed by the waters of regi nerat ion and dowered, with the graces of First Communion, these "workers of iniquity" in-iquity" are painting with lurid colors the lost -.mi's epitaph. Now listen to what God's prophet ha- to say of these men and women: "These men defile the flesh, nnd despise au'hority. and blasphem--Majesty. They blaspheme whatsoever thinks they know not; nnd what things I hey naturally knew, like dumb beasts, in these I hey are corrupted. They are raging waves of the sea. foaming out their own confusion, wandering stars, to whom ihe storm of darkness is re-served forever." I IF BERT LARK IN. |