Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/72

challenge a refutation of your statements, no matter from what quarter it may come—then the world, in an ecstasy of astonishment, will unanimously proclaim your magnanimity, your greatness, and your success, and will pronounce you pious, happy, and triumphant!

I know not if there exists anything under the sun, more vile and despicable than mankind, outside of the Catholic way.

In the scale of degradation and vileness, the multitude who are oppressed by tyrants and deceived by sophists are the most degraded and abject; the sophists who deceive them rank next; and the tyrants, who sway a bloody scepter over both, are, to the eye of the careful observer, the least debased and contemptible of all. The first idolaters had scarcely abandoned God, when they delivered themselves up to the Babylonian tyrants. We see ancient paganism going from one abyss to another, from sophism to sophism, from tyrant to tyrant, until it falls into the hands of Caligula, a horrid and frightful monster in human shape, the victim of insensate desires and bestial inclinations. Modern paganism commenced by self-worship in the person of a prostitute, to be crushed at the feet of Marat, the cynical and bloody tyrant, and the cruel Robespierre, who, with his inexorable and ferocious instincts, was the supreme embodiment of human vanity. The new form of paganism is destined to fall into a still more profound and obscure abyss. Already, perhaps, from under the depths of social corruption, the monster gains strength, who will one day impose upon society a still heavier and more shameless yoke than any it has as yet borne.