OCR Text |
Show : SECOND IMPORTANT LETTER . ) The Natiion Ever Reverts to Religious Ne-1 Ne-1 I gation Hon ors of the Commune Fire and Destruction Their Motto Hatred of " : Religion and Its Ministers the Principle s; of the Frenzied Mob. I ' o thi Fdilor. Sir: Wherever men worship God mhI reverence the name of Jesus Christ, no matter what may lie their religions opinions or by j ; what i Itlo ihov call themselves, they ennnot fail to t j fed admiration and sympathy for the Catholic .( Church in France. Avhich for one hundred and twen- 1y years has withstood the onset of the foes of f ? Christianity. Adolph Thiers was quite right when. 5 i quote from your correspondent, he said: "Th.: i legislator who tries to make a religion of atheism f ! is a madman who eventually must ruin the country ; lie misleads hy his fanaticism." A race may revert to heathenism: it is impossi- hie for it to remain a religious negation. Nature in U the intellectual and religious orders ahhors. as in J the material, a vacuum. When, in the past, human f beings lost belief in the only Cod ihey were eun-, eun-, strained by the call and necessity, of their being to f' make Gods unto 1 hem selves. - T was in Lyons when the communists organized a government nf their own in defiance of the Con-MiUilional Con-MiUilional Boly ihen assembled at Versailles, with jj Thiers as temporary president. The establishment, ji f the Commune was the inauguration of a carnival j of lust, of low brutality and unbridled license end-ji end-ji ing in the slaughter of twenty thousand citizens. ''The Commune' wrote Gabriel Honatavys, 'once S again hurled France into one of theinuist tragie I in isforl unes humanity has known'. ;' I XoJ .in"5 1 was -lr-ro -ed ;)nVhoio t. tipou. earth vv.'lv..!-i'ns-.sion of !;'.fit:2. of red ill 7n a d i ifss." of Convulsive nAt: ' ; .: d";vl ft'iiir lr - - . . Z 'n.e . I; v.-ort i"meut?"of the great city. Hie submerged I l.eJthe godless and lawless, led by the noto- - -'jr Clu-erot. lhat ulcerated Bohemian Felix Pat f..mm" ilw scrofulous Raoul Rigault; came to the T surface. . - x I "Madmen of this kind, ' wrote Francis Sarcey, ( . ''and in such large numbers and with a common t understanding constitute so terrible a danger for J society that there is no longer any possible penalty except extermination." I MacMahon, by order of Thiers, opened fire upon the city and the Communists replied by burning burn-ing the Palais Royale. the city hall, the Church of Saint Eutache. On the night of May 2.j the chiefs f the Commune met in council. "Let us destroy i he city." cried out the atheist. Bebick, "and go down in its ruins." Aniorcux from his seat called " -'Ut. "Let us first strike the priests."' At. once Ferre. provisional mayor, wrote an order, or-der, handed it 1o Gen ton. and early the next morning morn-ing the Archbishop of Paris, his secretary. Abbe Deguonoy. Fathers Clere, Doucoursey. Aleard md Bor.jeou were taken from their prison and massacred. massa-cred. Twenty-two years before, the illustrious Affre, Archbishop of Paris, was shot to death, when, with en olive branch in one hand and a crucifix cru-cifix in the oilier, he appealed to hi fellow citizens who were slaughtering each other, to make peace. , I Six years afterwards they murdered Archbishop Ci-1 Ci-1 bre in the sanctuary of Xotre Dame cathedral, in-I in-I voking upon themselves the judgment of our Lord I upon the Jews. "That upon you may come all the just blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of Abel the Just, even to Zacharias, Ihe son of Bara- chias whom you killed between the temple and the . I :dtar." i The Honorable Mr. Wasbbourne was then the f minister from the United States accredited to the ' Napoleonic court. He remained in his official ca-i ca-i pucity at the embassy all through the siege and ' ? 1 he "reign of terror." On his return to this country coun-try he wrote his very readable work. "Paris During the Siege and After." but his high official position find respect for international amenities suggested to .- liini tf omit from his book the most shameful inci dents and inhuman atrocities which will ever re- jnuin the "deep damnation of the anti-Christian. Commune." Immediately after ihe slaughter of ihe Archbishop Arch-bishop and his priests the crowd was allowed free-feeding free-feeding for its anti-religious violence. Cremieux y organized ihe Fetrolousos. a regiment of six hun-3 hun-3 dred fallen women "the females with hanging " I VoreHsts," M. Pessard calls them in his book to carry I Val oil to the men, and help to saturate the wood-1 wood-1 MVk of the convents churches and public huild-?! huild-?! uJ in preparation for that night of terror when . l Pris became a huge brasier. ! I I entered Paris soon after MacMahon took the eity. and the scene of desolation is as green in my memory today as it was that first night I retired io my liolel. The Communists had burned ihe i Palais Boyale, ihe Tuilleries and many of" the I churches; had wrecked the Veudome monument to Bonaparte and had tried to destroy the Louvre, the4" ' greatest museum and treasury of art in Europe outside of Koine. The exigency of space forbids me to enter into details, but no priest, bishop or even Sister of Charity appeared, except at the peril of life, on the streets of Paris durintr that porbd of murder, riot and lawlessness. The men now conspiring against God and "His Christ" are the ' sons of ihcm who killed the prophets. la those days there was not a murderer, an ::-nssiIU a rwd woman, a thief LJiot a rationalist. r.-i :ilwh,iho fiend or an atheist in the city that did ""I join in the cry, "abas les pretres" down with " j L. 1 1 , . , the priests. It was a return to the morning of the Crucifixion when ihe mob before Pilate's balcony shouted. '"Crucify ITim." I come now to the causes j or reasons which, to my mind, conspired to slowly, j but surely, corrode the faith of the proletariat, or j workingmen. and the youth of France. It is well j to remember that at heart France is Catholic and j will remain so. Fully five-eighths of her male population pop-ulation are what we call in this country fairly practical Catholics, very maay, indeed, of the number num-ber being monthly communicants. But, like most religious people the world over, they are poor poli- . tieians. Their consciences will not permit them to lie. to equivocate, to "whip the devil around the corner," or indited to fight the devil with his own weapons. They are not armed for the fray: they are too honest to make successful candidates, and seven times out of ten are beaten at the polls. They will not stoop to "switch" a ballot or "stuff the ballot box." and to bribe a constituency would be a inortal sin. Conscience or, the hereafter doesn't trouble their opponents; they're out to win. and they do win. My familiarity with French social and literary liter-ary life has convinced me that three great and dominant agcncies.'jhave united their forces to destroy de-stroy religion in fy:anee. These are: oath-bound secret societies; a'vwrrupt and reptile press, auj an immoral and ant'jChristian literature, including a prostituted art. a . . Tn Franco -M , naiVbowiji Secret, organiziiiim.v such as ihe IlluuiiniiiJ Freemasons' and aftilifcte'd ? societies .nre 4, er.ef nes ..ojv. ChH;Uniitv. 4 make no secret oT il'eir . hotlility. . v 11 at" .may in.-" the attitude of these .societies in so-called Protest-; ant countries (s, iU now concern us. but . in . Latin-Europe and 11 Latin-America they are. ranked as heresies by the church , and their mem- bers ex-communicated. ,- In France for tlue last sixty years Freemasonry '. has assumed a most anti-Catholic and virulent attitude. at-titude. As far back as 1S58 the Freemanson Proudhion in his hook on "Justice in Revolutions in the State and in the Church." wrote: "The God of the Masons is neither substance, cause, soul. Creator. -Paraclete, Redeemer or Devil. . . No altar, no image, no sacrifice, no prayer, no absolution, absolu-tion, no mysteries, no priesthood, no profession of faith, no creed." On Sept. 14, 1877. at a grand assembly held in Paris, the delegates of French Masonry, acting under advice from all lodges under obedience to. the Grand Orient, struck out of their statutes the articles which affirmed that: "The object ob-ject of Freemasons is benevolence; the study of morality and the practice, of all virtue. Its basis is "the existence of God. the immortality of the soul and the love of humanity." For this it substituted: sub-stituted: "Freemasonry has for principles absolute liberty of conscience and solidarity of humanity. It excludes no one on account of his religious opinions." opin-ions." This declaration of freedom opened the Masonic door to athesists. deists and freethinkers. The Masons of England and the United States had already proclaimed that no man could be initiated in-itiated into the mysteries till he had first declared his belief in God and the immortality of the soul. Theyinow (1S78) severed their connection with the Grand Orient of France and lodges in its obedience. obedi-ence. Since ihen. 1 am told, the misunderstanding has been amicably settled and a profession of belief be-lief in God or the immortality of the soul is not now. in any part of the world, exacted from a candidate can-didate seeking admission to the order. -The hostility of Freemasonry to the Catholic church which represents the affirmation, of the supernatural su-pernatural and the attacks made by members of the order in France and Italy on the Divinity of Christ, largely contributed to the conversion to the Catholic church of ihe Marquis of Ripon. supreme grand master of British Masonry and lately viceroy vice-roy of India. And now, notice this: When the "League of ihe Rights of Parii" waited upon Thiers at Versailles, where the seat of the government govern-ment of France then rested, and failed to obtain suspension of hostilities on behalf of the Communists, Com-munists, the Freemasons of Paris decided on a solemn intervention. They planted the banners of their seventy-two, lodges .11 the ramparts and sent, a deputation to Thiers, provisional president of France. He listened to them, but demanded an Tin- conditional surrender of the city. Ihe deputation returned and, writes Gabriel Hanotaux in his hook, Contemporary France.' the lodges declared solemnly solemn-ly for the Commune." Today, in France; no man need aspire to any governmental or civic position, to any judicial or appointive office, or indeed tender on the smallest governmental contract till he has accredited himself with a Masonic lodge. I do not believe there is a thirty-second degree or thirty-third thirty-third degree Mason in all France that at any lime offers a prayer to God. The order is numerically very strong in France, and among its members are some of the brightest, brainiest and cleverest anti-Christians anti-Christians in Europe. The Masonic order is the ablest and most astute enemy with which the Christian church in Latin-Europ& has ercr,.closed, and would, I think, win out if the Triune God were neutral. But that "Behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation ofj the world," determines de-termines for all ti:-. the issue of the struggle." j |