Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/304

this effort of one who is deprived of strength? Who will command man to raise himself from the depths into which he has fallen, and the weight of sin under which he groans, to the heights of the heavenly mountain? I know that the voluntary and heroic acceptance of affliction, of my cross, will elevate me beyond myself; but how am I to love that which by nature I abhor, and how hate what I naturally love? how am I to do this by an act of my own free will? I am commanded to love God, and I feel through all my veins the corrosive love of myself. I am ordered to walk, and I am bound in chains. I cannot acquire any merits on account of my sins, and I cannot get rid of the sins which oppress me unless some one delivers me. But no one can redeem me unless he have for me an infinite love anterior to any merit of my own; and where can I find such a love? I am scorned of God, and the derision of the universe. In vain shall I drag myself throughout the earth; my disgrace everywhere follows me; and in vain shall I lift my eyes toward heaven, from whence no cheering ray of hope descends to console me.

If this were so, the Catholic edifice, which has been so carefully established, must fall, deprived of its crowning glory, and of that foundation stone upon which it rests. Like a new tower of Babel, raised through pride and founded upon the unstable sand, it would be utterly demolished by the fury of the tempest. Then human order and universal order are only sonorous words, and all those profound problems which perplex and sadden humanity remain involved in an invincible obscurity, in spite of the vain assemblage of Catholic solutions. Although they are more consistent than the solutions of the rationalist schools, yet their connection