Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/37

just, most loving, most strong, most powerful, most pure, most prudent, most beautiful, most wise. The East knows his voice, the West obeys him, the South venerates him, the North acknowledges him. His word fills creation, the stars stand as his sentinels, the seraphim reflect his glory from their glowing wings, the heavens are his throne, and he holds suspended in his hand the fullness of the earth. When, in the fulfillment of prophecy, the Catholic God appeared, it was the signal for the downfall of all the idols made by men. Nor could it have been otherwise, inasmuch as all these human theologies were only mutilated fragments of the Catholic theology; and the gods of various nations were merely the deification of some of the essential properties of the true God, the God of the Bible.

Catholicism controls the body, the senses, and the soul of man. Its dogmatic theology teaches men what they must believe; its ethics instruct them as to the duties of life, while its mystic theologians, soaring still higher, teach men to rise on the wings of prayer, to ascend the effulgent steps of the ladder of Jacob, on which God descends to the earth and men ascend to heaven, until the heavens and the earth, men and angels, alike glow in the fire of divine love.

Through Catholicism man recognized the law of order, and through man this order entered into society. The redemption regained for the moral world the laws which it had lost through prevarication and sin. Catholic dogma became the criterion for the sciences, Catholic ethics the guide for human actions, and Catholic charity the standard for the affections. Human conscience, freed from the corrosive action of error and sin, was thus enlightened in its interior, as in its exterior dark-