Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/88

he tenderly loved heeded not his imploring and caressing accents and fell from the height of the apostolate into the abyss of treason.

From the beginning of time the Church of Jesus Christ was announced by great prophets, and represented by symbols and figures. In laying her immortal foundations and forming her divine hierarchy upon a superhuman model, her divine Author made known her future history to his Apostles. He announced to them her great tribulations and unexampled persecutions, and they beheld the bloody procession of her confessors and martyrs. He foretold that the powers of the world and of hell would combine to form horrible and sacrilegious alliances against her, and how, by the power of grace, she should triumph over all their machinations. His divine vision penetrated through the prolongation of ages, and he predicted the end of all things, the immortality of the Church, and her transformation into the celestial Jerusalem, clothed in light, glittering with jewels, filled with glory, and diffusing the sweetest fragrance. And yet the world, which has beheld the Church always persecuted and always triumphant, which could number and has numbered her victories by her tribulations, furnishes her continually the occasions of new victories by subjecting her to new trials, thus blindly fulfilling the great prophecy, even while it forgets alike the prophecy and the prophet. The Church is perfect and most holy, as her divine Founder was perfect and most holy. She, likewise, and she alone, has been able to pronounce before the world that word, never before heard, "who shall convince me of error, who shall convince me of sin?" And in spite of this astonishing word, the world contradicts and pursues her