The Messiah's message

Book i Copyright N° COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT

BY

JOHN JOSEPH ROBINSON

Germany 68, Great Russell Street

NIHIL OBSTAT.

Sti. Ludovici, die 27. Oct., 191 1 F. G. HOLWECK.

Censor Librorum.

IMPRIMATUR.

Sti. Ludovici, die 28. Oct., 191 1

f Joannes J. Glennon,

Archiepiscopus Sti. Ludovici.

Copyright, 1912, by

JOSEPH GUMMERSBACH.

-BECKTOLD —

PRINTING AND BOOK MFG. CO.

ST. LOUIS, MO.

Preface

Every word that fell so sweetly from the lips of Jesus Christ was a marvelous revelation to a bewildered world, every revelation contained a sublime truth, and every truth was full of a hope or solace. Our Lord must have been the center of all eyes wherever he went, and His words must have diffused all around a soft and genial atmosphere of holiness. His conversation fell like a gentle and heavenly dew upon his hearers' hearts, rousing up in them whatever was fruitful. " The art of Apostolical conversation/' says Father Coleridge, " is one of the most delicate and beautiful of the instruments which God uses for the benefit of souls, and it must have been possessed in fullness by our Lord, Who clothed all His actions, demeanor, and words with the most lovely and gracious affability. And, therefore, any attempt on the part of human language and human imagery must necessarily have been an inadequate vehicle to faithfully portray Him." Christ Himself knew what difficulties would confront us in this matter, and out of consideration for us He generally had recourse to parables to explain His divine message. These parables preached by His ministers throughout the world go straight to the hearts of men and rouse up the sleeping echoes in those who hear them willingly and

iii iv

Preface profit by them. Yes, this beautiful character, Christ, brought a message to the world as His guest, it was a message of love and leniency. He clothed it with unparalleled beauty and graciousness, but the world was not attracted by its beauty, nay, the world, to a great extent, rejected that message, which He clearly explains in the parable of the wedding feast of the king s son. That message contained in His Gospel, is the message of truth, and, therefore, is hated by the world because the world does not wish to hear the truth. That message is abhorred by the world because it calls the world an impostor. The world wars against this message because it commands us to practice self-denial and not allow the three concupiscences to drag us into the slough of the world. Notwithstanding this hatred and bitterness against it, from the day that the divine Messenger Himself suffered death on its behalf on Calvary, from that sad afternoon when the crimson fountain first burst forth on Golgotha, the same purple stream will continue its course to the end of time, for the heroic messengers of that message will continue to bear it to a sinful and warring world laying down their lives in its defense.

We often hear it said that there is nothing original. I may say that this applies to the present work, " The Messiah's Message." However, sometimes a face looks different, apparently so, according to the hat that one may wear; in other words, the same ideas can be expressed in different language, and their expression looks the more pleasing according to the language in which they are expressed. A bad fitting coat make9

Preface v a man look slovenly, while a suitable fitting one makes him look smarter and more attractive. I hope that I don't arrogate too much to myself, when I claim to have placed part of the MESSIAH'S MESSAGE in a mold that brings out more clearly some of the beauties of Christian teaching.

In the compilation of this book I owe much to many authors whose words I could not improve on, and hence I quoted them without alteration. Some passages I transposed in order to render the doctrine more easily understood. This has been done by many writers. St. Augustine extracted from Plato some of his loftiest ideas, and the writers of the Middle Ages interlaced some of their beautiful conceptions with those of Aristotle. With such examples before me I claim your indulgence.

The Author,

Contents

PAGE

" Ne Sutor Ultra Crepidam " i

"Let not the shoemaker go beyond his last."

Part II

General Washington called religion and morality the " two great pillars of human happiness/' and the " firmest props of the duties of men and citizens," that reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle. Therefore, to swerve from religion is to endanger the life of a nation.

Survey the state of society to-day, and it won't require a very acute mind to see into what depths we could fall if the hand of religion was removed from supporting us, without it there is no honesty in the mart, nor would there be justice in the tribunal. Without honesty and justice to pilot us we see trusts suspected of commercial tyranny, and the tribunals appointed to investigate the causes of the disease become tainted with the disease and unveil their own venality, the virus was contagious and they are spattered all over with the fetid pus, dissolution sets in and companies dissolve, and both promoters and venal legislators curse from behind prison bars.

If a nation ignores God, ceases to worship Him, laughs at His laws, the horizon of that nation instead of being succeeded by a splendor of meridian brilliancy, it will become retrograde, and dissolve into a terrifying darkness. Suppose all the people of the United States were atheists, the poor would be fools if they would not murder you to have your property. Their minds would be ever active to elude the policeman. Everyone would be a burglar, if an opportunity presented itself where he could escape the meshes of the law, he would appropriate his neighbors' money.

Can the state govern society without religion? Is temporal power strong enough to repress opposition from a people who have no religion, a people who make the senses and earthly enjoyment the end of all knowledge, so that matter becomes at once the source, the means, and the end of all philosophy. I say emphatically no. Civilization may polish the surface of society, but it requires a stronger and a holier principle to restrain its corruptions. If you teach a people to ignore God; if you teach a people that there is no hereafter, and that the present is the end of all things; that morality, duty, faith are words of vague import; that morality is the palate by whose smack we judge of the utility or the inutility of actions; that this world of ours is a thing of chance; to force and matter all things are reducible, that nature is the ever active principle that energizes everything; if this be the gospel of the state, then justice and judgment will be swallowed up in the blind gulfs of sensualism, and we would be living on the thin crust of a moral earthquake, a crust that would soon crack and cause a social overthrow. This is a gospel that the mind of man would easily embrace, because it removes all moral check and restraint from the indulgence of our lower passions.

Theologians teach that law is a moral rule existing in the mind, but there is no mind, no intelligence, nor will in nature, therefore it could not be the seat of those laws. Material things are passive in the hands of God, as they are passive in the hands of man. It is their nature to be passive, and to move as they are moved. All motion has its origin in the will of some spiritual being; no other explanation of its existence is possible. God is the Prime Mover of all things. The law of movement is in God ; the order and measure of that movement is in the unconscious creature. Now when we look no higher than nature for the laws that give order, regularity, measure, and mutual dependence to its elements we ascribe to that insensible nature what belongs to God. When we ascribe laws to material nature, we transfer the exalted honor of law, the attribute of intelligence, from God to unconscious matter. When, therefore, a people is inoculated with this materialistic doctrine, when religion is eradicated from the mind, and unbelief holds its place, if man is devolved from a piece of carbon combined with other ingredients, if man sprung from the earth as a grain of wheat develops after it is placed in the ground by the sower, if man's highest ideals are no more than the sublimated mud of a protoplasm, if religion is only a bugbear to frighten women and children, if such doctrines were accepted by the masses, then the awful truth would appear in hell fire, life would become unbearable and the unguent that soothes deep grief and sorest trials could no longer exist. A blight-producing plague must visit a people where this drivel of pretending science takes root which is no more than a clumsy hypothesis. Skepticism, irreverence, indifference must grip the minds of the youth when they hear such doctrines by those votaries of natural science, and pave the way for more brutalizing effects than the basest theogonies of ancient paganism. If the masses professed such a creed, liberty, bravery, courage, and everything noble in man, purity, devotedness, and elevation of spirit in women would be substituted by debauchery, brutality, and crime. This is a natural consequence. Because if there be no God, no responsibility, no spirituality, no hereafter, if man be only an expanded protoplasm, why should we attach any blame to our fellowmen for squeezing as much pleasure out of life as they possibly can, why should they not indulge in criminal lusts which give them the most pleasure. Such belief would make society a swine trough, and human barriers would be insufficient to govern the people.

I will now appeal to English and French history for facts to substantiate this truth, that the decay of faith is accompanied with the decay of morals and rectitude, and when this decay is set in the people become ungovernable. I will quote two unquestionable authorities with reference to religious sentiment in England during the nineteenth century. Gregg says in his work " Rocks Ahead," " Very large proportion, probably the majority, of the operative class in towns, are total unbelievers; and these are not the reckless and disreputable, but, on the contrary, consist of the best of the skilled workmen, the most instructed and thoughtful, as well as the steadiest. The hard-headed, industrious engineers and foremen, the members of mechanics' institutes, the natural leaders of the artisans, are skeptics intellectually, not morally; they disbelieve because they have inquired, argued and observed, and have not been able to obtain from their Methodist fellow-workmen, or even from their ministers of the gospel, satisfactory answers to their doubts. Among manufacturing artisans and the highest description of citizen laborer, it may be stated, with even more confidence than of the ranks above them in the social scale, that the intellect of this body is already divorced from the prevalent creeds of the country. The range and form of this skepticism varies widely in the different classes. Among workingmen it is for the most part absolutely atheism, and is complicated by a marked feeling of antagonism towards the teachers of religion, a kind of resentment growing out of the conviction that they have been systematically deluded by those who ought to have enlightened them. Thinkers of the higher order among the educated classes, and more especially scientific men, by no means as a rule, go so far as this, but content themselves with pronouncing God to be unknowable, and His existence unprovable ; the distinctive doctrines of Christianity, and the details of its historical basis, neither made out nor in any way admissible, and a future life to be a matter of mere speculation, which may or may not be in store for us,

8 4 but as to which no rational man would dare to dogmatize. Literary men and scholars are often skeptical merely as to special creeds, though sincerely and deeply religious in tone and temperament But all concur in repudiating existing forms of Christianity; that is, the common religion of the nation, the Jehovah of the Bible, the hell and heaven of the divines and priests, the resurrection of the gospels, and the salvation — formulas and creeds of churches/'

A writer in the magazine, The Month, says, " The advance of infidelity among a large portion of the generation now entering or having entered upon the full enjoyment and use of life, has reached the line at which even morality becomes a sentiment rather than a law ; conscience a phenomenon rather than the voice of God sitting in judgment; free-will and responsibility an imagination; the universe a physical system self-evolved and self-regulated; the soul of man mechanism; the future of man a blank; sin, original and actual, a fiction; atonement an impossible superstition." Now what was the condition of England during this time? I will quote an extract from a speech of the Bishop of Salford which I find in a lecture of Archbishop Vaughan: "During the five years ending 1824 there were 65,000 cases of crime recorded; but during a like period ending 1874 there were no less than 408,000 of such cases ; or, in other words, crime had increased sixfold during the last half century, while the population had but doubled. Taking more recent dates, say from i860 to 1874 assault had increased 36 per cent., breaches of peace

124 per cent.; damage to property 69 per cent.; misdemeanor 37 per cent. ; prostitution 36 per cent. ; desertion of families 75 per cent.; larceny 64 per cent.; drunkenness 110 per cent.; people having no visible means of support 73 per cent., and all this while population has only increased 18 per cent." Such was the moral and spiritual corruption of man.

When impiety sharpened her tongue against God in that awful tempest which howled at the close of the eighteenth century in France, and which was a scourge sent forth by an offended Deity to chastise and purify a wicked people, we have an incontestable proof that it is futile to attempt to govern a people from whose minds belief in God has been obliterated.

France having reached the summit of prosperity and glory under the paternal government of a long succession of good monarchs, she at length grew weary of her happiness and fidelity. She lent too credulous an ear to false prophets and seducers. Fashionable unbelief and the easy morals of the splendid age of Louis the XIV produced a luxuriant crop of authors who perpetuated their errors in writings remarkable for attractive grace and classic elegance of style. Materialistic philosophers, encouraged by the debauchery of a depraved court, proceeded fearlessly to carry out their designs by outraging religion and undermining the principles of faith and morals; of such men were Bayle, Voltaire, D'Alembert, Diderot, Rousseau, all working each in his own way for the utter annihilation of religion. It was Diderot who said, that if he were in need of a rope to hang the last king, he would make it out of the entrails of the last priest. In these very words of Diderot we hear the portentous rumblings of that approaching earthquake which soon upheaved both altar and throne and overthrew the most sacred institutions of France in chaotic ruin.

A new generation of scholars educated under such masters, and having hardly any religious knowledge, and certainly destitute of all religious habit and devotional feeling, had gone forth from the colleges to become active members of society. By their teaching truth had been crushed out of men's minds to give room to rationalistic philosophy, and to unfounded prejudices, accordingly the impiety which had hitherto been confined to the inhabitants of the city, began to find its way into the provinces, and to permeate the rural populations; the consequence was, loyalty to God became a subject of derisive mockery.

The principles of negation continued more and more to develop themselves in a thousand different channels ramifying from the same source, till they had become absorbed in that general abandonment of belief, to which the way had already been paved by a coextensive corruption of morality. The lower classes had no hope of betterment from the iron rule of their materialistic rulers, and their own belief leaving them destitute of any divine help, unrayed upon by the faintest glimmer of faith, and unwarmed by the least scintillation from the high altar of heaven, dashed with wild fury into the most abominable excesses. Recognizing no rights in others, and outraging what every honest man held to be sacred, they pretended they were desirous of making all equal, when their only purpose was to bend the necks of others beneath their own yoke. The promised liberty and equality were nowhere to be found except on the battlefield, on the scaffold and in the grave; and the boasted fraternity, which was to bind all mankind in one common family, consisted in a bond of common hatred of all the human race except themselves.

Perversion of morals follows the perversion of the intellect. Vice and virtue were ascertained to be mere conventionalisms, they were the hallowed names of Utility and Inutility. Whatever is virtuous is only so because it is useful, everything else is imposture and fabrication. With this gospel to guide the people naturally a deep and inveterate corruption developed itself in all ranks of society, from the throne to the cottage. The immoral life of the king lowered the standards of the age, and exhibited in his person an example of unfeeling selfishness and unblushing debauchery. So notorious was his debauchery, that upon one occasion, when some children had been kidnaped from Paris, a rumor was circulated that they had been carried away to furnish materials for a bath of human blood to the monarch, in order to invigorate his body wasted by excesses. The morals of the nobility also partook of the general taint. The French literature of the period was extremely licentious. The leading writers in France, just before the revolution, appear to have been almost studiously anxious to scatter indelicacies through their pages. Life was like an enchanted vision, but behind the deceptive scene the guillotine was silent rearing its bloody head. God was forgotten, a film covered the wounds of the state, giving the appearance of health, while corruption was spreading unseen. Infidelity seated at the tables of the rich proclaimed a glorious advent was nigh when the miseries of humanity would disappear. It was in this den and glitter of prostitution that liberty was nurtured in France, and it could not have a cradle more impure. In blood was the tree of liberty planted. It grew, watered by the tears of misery, its fruits were full of rottenness, whilst its leaves shed pestilence and death all around.

The press poisoned the public mind by attributing every motive that was malicious and degrading to the then governing power in the state, it pandered to the passions and thirst of the mob for human blood. Mirabeau held that the Catholic Church and freedom were mutually incompatible; away then with the Church! Triellard asserted that the convent was the abode of tyranny, the prison of sorrowing hearts suffering in silence; away then with the priests! Monarchy was merely a form consisting of one supreme head, and a privileged class to protect him from the mob who paid taxes to support him; away then with the Monarchy! The privileged class living sumptuously, felt not the soul-piercing cry of tyranny, nor the maddening famine and wretchedness of the starving wife and little ones, and the thousand and one agonizing scourges of the poor, moreover it lived in

8 9 an atmosphere of unreined licentiousness; away therefore with the privileged class ! The cauldron of crime and corruption was increasing in temperature by each fresh application of inflammable matter, and only awaited something more to be added to boil over. On the ninth of August, 1792, the signal was given by the bells from their steeples pealing their deathknell notes. What a fearful night. It was a carnival of crime, outlawry and butchery, and yells of exultant joy hailed this wide-spread carnage. Horrible the hour when man's soul in its paroxysm of rage spurns asunder the barriers of righteousness. Bolts jingle and prison doors are burst open, the priests are dragged from their homes and hurled from their cells to be hewn asunder; corpses pile one upon another, and the gutters run red with blood. Oh, what a fearful night, listen to the yells of men and the shrieks of women, yells wearying down to low growls; the brave are not spared, nor the beautiful, nor the weak. When morning dawned, the palace of the King was surrounded by a lawless mob, the King was seized and rushed to prison and afterwards beheaded. The massacre continued for three days while about five thousand victims sank beneath its violence. The savage passions of these men overpowered every principle of reason and humanity, and while glorying in having destroyed the fetters of despotism, they proved themselves to be the abject slaves of sin, cruelty and corruption.

The torrent of the revolution commenced to swell.

Brutal armies swept like demons of destruction over hill and dale trampling the harvests of the husbandman, burning villages, bombarding cities, and throwing shot and shells into nurseries where mothers, maidens, and infants, cowered in the agony of terror. Christianity was declared to be of a purely human invention; accordingly by the decree of 1792 universal toleration was granted to every form of worship except Christianity; the churches were then profaned, pillaged, and turned into temples of reason. The existence of God was publicly denied; the Sabbath was abolished, and every tenth day was named for the purpose of relaxation and festivity. The last resting place of the dead was violated, and a notice was placed at the entrance bearing this inscription "Death is but a perpetual sleep." It was thus impiously hoped that the very name of Christianity, would, in time, be blotted from the remembrance of the nations of the earth. As the revolution proceeded, atheism and irreligion assumed a bolder front. The bells of the churches were melted into cannon; the spires of the churches were in many cases leveled, because they violated the republican principle of equality, by rising above other edifices. The sacred vessels were melted down and coined into money to replenish the national treasury; the crosses were wrenched from their places and thrown into the river while infidelity wagged its head in exultation, and shrieked aloud, lo ! see how Christianity passeth away. " It is not enough to destroy the body, but let us crush the wretch," meaning Jesus Christ.

The crowning exhibition of impiety was still to follow. Two miserable men named Chaumette and Herbert, members of the municipality of Paris, one day at the head of a procession, to which history has no parallel, waited on the convention. A number of young females walked before another female mysteriously veiled and clothed in azure garments. This personage having been led forward with great ceremony, Chaumette announced to the assembly that the time had arrived when men should cease to fear a supreme Being, and he now introduced in the goddess of reason, an object more worthy of their homage, " Fall, O veil of Reason, before this venerable assembly " ; as he uttered these words, he drew aside the veil, and revealed to their gaze the features of a woman of infamous character. The Goddess of Reason was embraced by the President and afterwards conducted to the ancient cathedral of Notre Dame and placed upon the altar with the crucifix under her feet, and there enthroned as the object of national worship. Amidst this wild scene of disorder and drunken licentiousness an unknown voice exclaimed aloud, " O God, Thou wilt yet be avenged."

The divine vengeance most justly fell on the perpetrators of this fearful insult to the majesty of heaven, and vindicated the wisdom of God's government, and proves how sin becomes the instrument of its own punishment. Crime must find an inevitable meed not to be explained but on the principle of divine retribution. There never was an age in the history of the world in which retributive justice was so swift to overtake the authors of crime as this, and the most remarkable feature of their downfall and punishment is that these were brought about by the same agents that had contributed to their elevation.

The constitutional and monarchial party first fell. The Girondists, who had brought about that fall, next perished. The anarchial faction, too, after an apparent victory over all its opponents, shared in the dreadful rite. The impious promoters of the goddess of reason tasted the bitter consequences of their crimes. The Duke of Orleans, who sat in the convention under the name of Phillip of Equality was beheaded, on the sixth of November, 1793. Marat was stabbed by a young maid while in his bath. Danton, who rushed many to death without a trial, was condemned without a hearing; he fell by the iniquitous tribunal which he himself had formed. Robespierre, who was styled " The envoy of God " was among the last of the victims, as he was lead to prison, the mob howling like dogs from hell, a woman sprang on the car which conveyed him to the guillotine, and, waving her hand over him exclaimed, " Murderer of my kindred, thy death makes me rejoice, descend to the grave, laden with the reproaches of every wife and mother of France." One of the guards looking at the miserable man exclaimed with emotion, " Yes, Robespierre, there is a God." Upon the fall of the instrument of death, a shout of exultation was raised by the spectators, a shout that reechoed all over France. Misery rolled like a torrent all over France. Noble and peasant, the virtuous and the vicious, the learned and the unlearned were dragged to the guillotine like cattle to the shambles. After the execution of Robespierre, Lacointre ascending the tribune of the hall of the convention, courageously exclaimed " that a people without a religion, without a worship, and without a church, is a people without a country, and without a morality, destined eventually to sink to a condition of slaves, that contempt of religion had been the ruin of the French Monarchy, and would be the ruin of every people whose legislation is not founded on the unchangeable principles of morality and religion." Where, therefore, are there in history stronger facts than those presented to us by the French revolution, to prove to us, that civil authority in rebelling against religion forfeits its strongest safeguard against the rebellion of its own subjects. The normal condition of Christian society is that religion and the State be intimately united, that each shall use its appropriate weapons against turbulence and license. But if the two powers are in a state of not mutual harmony, but of mutual distrust, turbulence and license must be expected to assume fearful proportions. Reverence, therefore, is the civil ruler's greatest security for the stability of his power.