Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/259
Those who watched the herd were terrified at the effect of the divine word, and fled, communicating their terror to the people of the neighboring village, who assembled, and in a body besought the Saviour to depart from the country: Pastores autem fugerunt, et venientes in civitatem, nuntiaverunt omnia, et de eis qui demonia habuerant: et ecce tota civitas exiit obviam Jesu: et viso eo rogaverunt ut transiret a finibus eorum.[1] The omnipotence of the divine word was more terrible to these people than the enchantments of the infernal spirits.
When I hear a divine, that is to say, a Catholic doctrine announced, I immediately pause, and consider what it portends, as I know that it most assuredly proclaims either a miracle of divine justice or a prodigy of divine mercy. If this word is pronounced by the Church, I feel that it announces salvation; if it comes from any other source, it threatens death. Ask the world why it is filled with fear and terror; why sad and distressing rumors everywhere prevail; why this anguish and disturbance in the heart of nations, which, like men in a troubled dream, feel themselves to be on the verge of an abyss, into which they must fall. To ask the world this, is the same as to ask why men are alarmed, when they behold a madman or a knave enter into a powder magazine with a lighted torch. The one does not know, the other knows too well, the qualities of powder and the effect produced upon it by fire. What has, up to the present day, saved the world is, that the Church was in ancient times sufficiently powerful to extirpate heresies. These heresies principally consisted in teaching a different doctrine from that of the Church, and
- ↑ St. Matthew, viii. 38, 34.