PERILS OF GODLESS EDUCATION BY F. J. REMLER, C.M. Price, Five Cents INTERNATIONAL CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY 405-407 Bergen Street Brooklyn, N. Y. Imprinti potest , W. P. Barr, CM, St. Louis, Mo. March 31, 1927, PERILS OF GODLESS EDUCATION F. J. Remler, C.M. 1.—A FOOLISH SUPPOSITION Dear Reader: Try to picture to yourself the state of affairs that would obtain in the country under the fob lowing conditions : 1. A group of hare-brained politicians get it into their heads that modern medical science is a curse to the human race. True, it has achieved most wonderful results in the way of saving human life, of conquering and stamp- ing out epidemic diseases, of safe-guarding public health, and of greatly reducing the death rate from preventable causes ; but in spite of this our foolish politicians have decided that it is a curse to humanity and must therefore be banished from the land. 2. They devise and draw up a set of laws by which they gain complete control of all the medical and sur- gical schools of the country. Henceforth no reputable physician and surgeon of the old school is allowed to teach in them. The old text books are banned from the class rooms ; the costly scientific laboratories are dis- mantled, and the instruments sold to junk dealers. Should any man still insist on the old teaching, he is pronounced an enemy to progress and a traitor to his country, who must be dealt with as severely as the law allows. 3. In the next place all the medical schools are staffed by quacks, charlatans and mountebanks of every hue and Deacfcffffed 2 shade. These new professors are given every encour- agement and full liberty to teach whatever they fancy, no matter how absurd it is or how injurious in its effect on the public health of the nation. The more absurd their theories, the greater will be their reputation. In the meantime those reputable physicians who realize the gravity of the situation and therefore continue to teach correct principles and at their own expense try to main- tain schools for the training of doctors, are punished by fines, unjust taxation* confiscation and even imprison- ment. 4. All boards of health are abolished as being institu- tions devised for the infringement of personal liberty. All pure food laws, and the laws which regulate traffic in drugs, opiates and poisons are removed from the stat- ute books. Henceforth any one who cares to do so, may sell and distribute carbolic acid, prussic acid, opium, cocaine, strychnine, or any other poison that is known to exist. And not only is this traffic open to all* but it is also encouraged as being a source of enormous revenue to the country. 5. On the plea that there must be no infringement of personal liberty, those who are afflicted with communi- cable diseases, no matter how virulent and contagious, are permitted to mingle freely with the rest of the people anywhere and everywhere—in the streets, on trains and street-cars* in stores, churches, theatres, dance-halls, ho- tels, etc. The practice of isolating contagious cases, of establishing quarantine, of disinfecting houses, etc., is no longer tolerated as conflicting with the people’s liberty. 6. When contagious diseases threaten to become epi- demic, no measures of any kind are taken to check and eradicate them, both because such an action interferes with liberty, and also because it involves expense, labor, hardships, separation of friends and relatives, decline of* business, loss of money, interference with the enjoyment of amusement and pleasure. Now pause* dear Reader, and try to picture to your- self the necessary results of such an insane policy. Would they not be something like this: In a few decades the laboriously acquired knowledge of the true causes of diseases would be almost completely lost ; the wonderful discoveries and achievements of men like Pasteur, Lister, Koch, Virchow and a host of other great benefactors of the human race would soon be forgotten : the marvellous surgical operations by which so many lives are saved, would no longer be possible : technical training in medi- cine and surgery would be abandoned : in time of sick- ness and injury, and especially in times of epidemics people would be left helpless in their efforts to cope with disease, and would often in their ignorance adopt such measures as would only serve to spread it so much faster and wider. What would the state of public health be bound to become under such conditions? What, for example, would happen if some highly virulent contagion were to break out, say typhoid, or small pox, or cholera, or the dreaded bubonic plague? There is no need of possess- ing a very lively imagination to be able to picture to one's self the havoc and desolation that would follow in the wake of the insane policy outlined above, were it to be adopted at the command of silly politicians. What would become of our million population cities under such a regime? They would soon be converted into vast cem- eteries in which the dead would be counted by the thou- sands. And all this misery we would owe to our foolish politicians who insisted that the correct knowledge of medicine and scientific treatment of diseases was a curse to humanity. 4 FOLLY RUN RIOT What we have placed before the reader as an imag- inary happening will never take place. Men have too much common sense and love health and life far too much to allow the abolition of medical schools of proven repu- tation. But isn't it a very strange thing, that an experi- ment which would never be tried in regard to public health, is actually tried and pursued with obstinate per- severance in regard to Religion—the science of spiritual health and moral well-being of the human race? Here we encounter the following strange combination of af- fairs : 1. A group of men—unbelievers, infidels, enemies of God and His Church, animated by a religious hatred which has its origin, in hell—have decided that the Chris- tian, or to be more exact, that the Catholic religion* is a curse to the human race. Blind to the outstanding historical fact, or unwilling to see it, that the Catholic religion has given to the world what civilization there is, they have resolved to crush, and if it were possible, annihilate it. Men like Voltaire, Paine, Rousseau, In- gersoll and a host of others have labored with might and main to blot out her very memory and name. 2. With a great deal of method in their madness these enemies of God and the Christian religion have directed all their efforts, since the beginning of the last century, to the extinction of the faith by means of a system of education which is strictly “secular’.’, that is, without God and religion. The teaching of religion is rigidly excluded from, the courses of studies ; no men- tion of God and of Christian truths is tolerated in the class room. Children are to be brought up as though they were mere animals gifted with reason, but having no soul and no destiny hereafter. And this diabolical system either has already been made, or is to be made, 5 universal and compulsory for all children of school age. These enemies of the Church are fully convinced that if they succeed in bringing up the rising generations in complete unbelief, the nations of tomorrow will be free from what they call the tyranny of the Christian relig- ion and morality. Universal unbelief and unrestrained license will prevail everywhere. The world will have ac- complished what it so ardently desires—it will have cast off the hated yoke of the Gospel and become once more religion-less, God-less, pagan. 3. But while on the one ’hand no religious instruction of any kind is permitted in the class room, there are, on the other, no restrictions whatever placed on the doctrines that unbelievers, infidels, atheists, socialists, radicals and immoral men may choose to instill into the minds of their pupils. They are left perfectly free to teach all manner of lies and errors of history about the Catholic Church; they may scoff and sneer at her as much as they please ; they may vilify and calumniate her to their heart’s content; they may even inculcate the most im- moral principles of conduct, and not a word of protest will be raised : but there is one thing they must never do, and that is, they must never presume to speak of God, or revealed religion, or of the duty of every man to keep the Ten Commandments for the purpose of secur- ing for himself eternal happiness in the next life. 4. This is especially true of many teachers and pro= fessors who are employed in our high schools, normal schools, colleges and universities. It is a well attested fact that many of these openly teach the most irreligious and radical principles, and such as are subversive and destructive of all Christian belief and morality.* There For a confirmation of this statement we refer the reader to a series of articles by Harold Bolce which appeared in the Cosmopolitan Review in 1909. In these articles Mr. Bolce gives a summary of the radical and revolutionary teaching that is dispensed to the young in the institutions of higher learning throughout the whole country. 6 are hundreds and thousands of young men and young women who year after year go forth from these schools to take their place in the world. By reason of their po- sition they become a mighty force for forming and mold- ing public opinion. The influence they exert far and wide as physicians, lawyers, politicians* financiers, judges, lawmakers, statesmen, lecturers, professors and especially as journalists, editors, and writers of books and maga- zine articles, is simply irresistible. It penetrates and permeates the social body as leaven does a mass of flour. And since these leaders and molders of public opinion constantly advocate principles which are unchristian, and in many cases anti-Christian and positively immoral, it is easy to conclude that in a few decades the whole social body must be saturated with false standards of morality which are bound to produce results the most ruinous and disastrous to the well-being of society. We quote the editorial summary that prefaced one of these articles, entitled: “BLASTING AT THE ROCK OF AGES” “Those who are not in close touch with the colleges of the country will be astonished to learn the creeds being- fos- tered by the faculties of our great universities. In hundreds of classrooms it is being taught daily: “That the decalogue (Ten Commandments) is no more sacred than a syllabus; “That the home as an institution is doomed; “That there are no absolute evils; “That immorality is simply an act of contravention of so- ciety's standards; “That democracy is a failure and the Declaration of In- dependence only spectacular rhetoric; “That a change from one religion to another is like getting h new hat; “That moral precepts are passing- shibboleths; “That conceptions of right and wrong are as unstable as styles of dress; “That wide stair-ways are open between social levels, but that to the climber children are an encumbrance; “That the sole effect of profligacy (adultery and fornication) is to fill tiny graves; “And that there can be and are holier alliances without the marriage bond than within it (free love, etc.).” 7 5. In the next place every possible effort is made to render the maintenance of private and religious schools extremely difficult, if not impossible. The false prin- ciple is invoked that the child belongs to the State, and must therefore be educated by it according to its own good pleasure and not as the parents desire. Catholics and other religious bodies that insist on maintaining their own schools, can do so only by paying extra taxes ; in many places their school property is subjected to addi- tional taxes ; now and then these schools are suppressed by the most unjust laws; and occasionally it happens that bigotry succeeds in stirring up riots which end in the destruction of churches, schools and convents. 6. Parents and religious leaders who stand up for their rights and insist on having their children trained in religious principles, are branded as unpatriotic, as enemies of the country and its liberties, and as dangerous traitors who must be denounced and punished to the fullest limit of the law. In short, these enemies of re- ligion have made it their set purpose to dechristianize the world and make it pagan once more ; and to succeed in . this they have adopted the most effective means there is—secular, that is, God-less education of the young. Satan could not have thought out a more effective one. 7. In addition to God-less education we have several other agencies that make for the dechristianizing of the world. Under the plea of liberty of religion, liberty of the press, liberty of speech, “art for art’s sake”, and the like, those who make it their business to inculcate false principles and promote the spread of immorality, op- pose all attempts at suppression or censorship of what must prove a menace to public morality. They claim the right to make the most scurrilous and blasphemous attacks on sacred and divine things ; to publish and selj 8 the most vile and corrupting books and papers ; to preach openly the most immoral doctrines and practices—prac- tices which spell decay of virtue and ruin of the nation, such as divorce, free love, trial marriages, the abomina- tions of birth-control the killing off of incurables and of hopelessly insane persons, and the like. 8. For the same reason there must be no interfer- ence with immoral productions of the stage and movie screen ; with the running of low and disreputable cafes, cabarets, dance halls and other places where the virtue of young people is sure to be hopelessly ruined. Another reason for the tolerance of these nurseries of vice and immorality is the claim that the suppression or regula- tion of them would mean the decline of certain lines of business and the loss of much money. In other words, souls may be sent to their eternal perdition by the thou- sands, just so business flourishes and plenty of money is made. FOOLS’ EXPERIMENTS We have seen what a dire calamity it would be for the country if our medical and surgical schools were leg- islated out of existence. Disease and death would stalk unhindered and unchecked over the land. Epidemics of various kinds, once they got a good start, would sweep like a prairie fire through village, town and city. And often the very means to which the people would have re- course in their desperation to stamp out the contagion would only serve to spread it far beyond the focus of infection. It must be plain to the reader that what we have given as a fictitious occurrence is simply an illustration of the chaotic conditions that must actually develop in the moral 9 and social order when the knowledge of religion is lost in a nation. Let the teaching of religion be legislated out of existence; let the knowledge of God and His holy law—the rules of spiritual, moral and social well-being — be lost ; let the perception of man’s true destiny here and hereafter be obscured ; let the fear of hell and the hope of heaven be rooted out of the hearts of men; let the young grow up like animals without a knowledge of the destiny that is ahead of them—either endless bliss and happiness in heaven or equally endless misery and woe in hell ; let these all-important truths be lost sight of, and nothing can be looked for except a steady increase of every imaginable kind of sin, vice and crime. In the absence of the restraining influence which re- ligion and the fear of God’s justice exercise on the thoughts and actions of men, vice and crime are bound to spring up and spread until they assume the propor- tions of veritable epidemics, just as would be the case if typhoid, cholera or the dreaded bubonic plague were to break out, and no medical aid were available to check and arrest the progress of the distemper. And when we speak here of epidemics of vice and crime we do not simply mean the deeds of open violence the endless recital of which greets our eyes with unfailing regularity in the newspapers, day after day,—thefts, bur- glaries, hold-ups, murders, bombing and dynamiting and the like—but we must also include the more refined sins and crimes of the upper classes, of the “social set”, which are not paraded in public, but are nevertheless very numerous and commonly far more heinous in the sight of God than are the grosser crimes of the common people. The licentious and voluptuous mode of life and the refined immorality that are often indulged in by the higher classes of society are more destructive of the wel- fare of the nation than are the open deeds of violence 10 committed by professional thieves, highway men and robbers. Of late years complaints have been growing on all sides about the alarming increase of youthful depravity. From all over the country reports come in that the great- est number of criminals now consists of young people. Our reform schools—which by the way, are not reform- schools* but nurseries of crime—are overcrowded and our jails are filling up with youthful criminals. So bad has this condition become, that it is now deemed necessary to hold conventions in order to study this problem and devise ways and means for checking the disquieting in- crease of crime among the youth of the land. A Remedy That Failed What is the explanation of this abnormal condition? Haven’t we been assured time and again by the advocates of God-less and religion-less education that all that was necessary to give us a virtuous and law-abiding youth was more knowledge—secular and scientific knowledge but without admixture of religion of any kind? And have we not spent millions of good money on expensive and finely equipped schools in the hope of training up our boys and girls into honest and upright members of so- ciety ? But instead of seeing our hopes realized we find that youthful depravity is growing at a rate that is truly alarming and that makes all well-wishers of the country fear for its future. And to add to our disappointment we are compelled to pay ever increasing sums of money for the erection and maintenance of still more reform- schools, juvenile courts and houses of correction. What can be the root of this evil? The answer is clear and easy. Every right thinking man who is not biased and blinded by religious hatred or prejudice must see as clear as the noonday sun that 11 the total exclusion of religious teaching from the edu- cational system that has been in vogue for the past hundred years, is one of the main causes of this deplor- able condition. We are now beginning to reap in good earnest the bitter fruits of a century’s experiment of bringing up the young absolutely without God and re- ligion. This is really a new thing in the history of civ- ilized nations ; for up to the beginning of the nineteenth century all education had a religious character. There was then no education without religion. It is only since the French Revolution that religion began to be ban- ished from the school room. Hence we are really as yet in the experimental stage. Judging from the re- sults so far obtained the nations have no reason for re- joicing over the policy they have adopted in their de- termination to shake off the yoke of the Gospel of Christ. SOW THE WIND, REAP THE WHIRLWIND Every man, no matter how deficient may be his knowl- edge of farming, knows full well what is bound to hap- pen by an unchanging law of nature when a field is left uncultivated. Two results are always noted. First, there will be no growth of good grain in that field. The farmer who would seriously expect to reap a large har- vest of wheat from a field which he did not even plow would be a fit subject for the observation ward in an insane asylum. No man can reap where he did not sow. In the second place, that field will be covered with weeds of all kinds. No cultivation is necessary to give them a chance to grow. They grow of themselves and pros- per without the aid of man. From all sides the seeds of them are wafted over the field by the winds, and find lodgement in the soil and begin at once to thrive lux- uriantly. Many an hour of hard toil will be necessary 12 before they are cleared away so that the field may once more be prepared for the growth of wheat or corn. Neither is a deep knowledge of human nature neces- sary to appreciate the fact that the heart of man, when left to itself and deprived of the ennobling influence of religious truth, must drift as naturally into evil as an un- cultivated field must produce weeds of various kinds. Not that man is essentially bad, nor that every man without religion is on the way to becoming a criminal—for there is such a thing as natural virtue which is possible even for the pagan who has never heard of God ; but we must remember that human nature has been so profoundly affected by the poison of original sin, that unaided by grace and religion the greater majority of men can not resist the temptations to evil that are continually thrown in their way, especially when they are living in unfavor- able environments and are thrown in contact with bad company. As Ye Sow, So Shall Ye Reap In view of this fact what may we not expect to find when our youth is allowed to grow up without the knowl- edge of God and of the Ten Commandments? What, if in addition to this absence of necessary knowledge, our young people are exposed to countless dangers of evil and the pernicious example of those who are already corrupted? And finally, what is bound to be the result when the system of education in vogue is teeming with false principles—principles which must lead to the ruin of society and the decay of the nation? In the illustra- tion given above we supposed the farmer to look for a plentiful harvest from an uncultivated field. What would we have to think of him if he deliberately sowed the seeds of poisonous plants, and then expressed surprise or disappointment because his fields did not produce bar- 13 ley or wheat or corn, but were overrun with noxious weeds and briars? It is a well-known fact that in addition to excluding God and religion, the system of secular education that prevails in nearly all the non-Catholic institutions of learning is fairly bristling with all kinds of erroneous teachings and false principles. These do not remain mere speculative questions subject to discussion in the class room; they are actually applied to everyday life. But now it must be borne in mind that one error in principle is far more ruinous than a hundred errors in practice. A man who holds right principles, may at times act wrong; but a man who holds false ones is by that very fact condemned to act wrong by a kind of necessity. A man who has a correct knowledge of arith- metic, may, at times make mistakes ; but these are soon discovered and corrected. But suppose a man holds that twice two is five, or that the figure seven stands for nine, or that in addition the units must be placed under the tens or hundreds, and such like silly ideas ; would he not throw his accounts into a hopeless confusion? It is the very same in the moral order. Persons who have received a good religious training, may commit, and in fact, often do commit violations of the law of God ; but then they realize that they have sinned and will try to make amends for it by repentance and pen- ance. But what chances for repentance have those who have never learned the law, but in place of it have been taught false principles and false standards of morality* so that they consider many sinful actions perfectly law- ful, and grave duties imposed by God as matters that can be disregarded with impunity? What hope is there of making them see the guilt of sin in actions that are contrary to God’s law ; what hope of getting them to repent? None whatever. On the very contrary they will claim that they have a perfect right to do whatever 14 their evil inclinations and sinful passions suggest to them. They have absolutely no sense and no fear of sin. Plain Speaking About Divorce Let us take just one example by way of illustration. There is that malignant cancerous growth on the modern social body, the evil of divorce. This heinous sin is considered a perfectly lawful thing by millions of people today. But just as it is true, and no amount of human reasoning can change it, that two and two make four, so also is it true, and no man can change it, that divorce is and remains a sin of great enormity in the sight of God, just as are perjury, murder and adultery. Whatever God has declared unlawful, no private person, nor group of persons, nor court, nor state or government can ever make lawful. Hence every time the state grants a divorce it commits a crime against the law of God and the order established by His divine authority. It has no more right to tell two persons who are properly married that their marriage is dissolved, than it has to tell them to poison their children or kill their parents. Yet society walking in the darkness of unbelief and religious ignorance, in consequence of its rejection of revealed religion, has come to this pass that it looks upon the monstrous evil of divorce as one of the most glorious achievements of this age and as a great blessing to the human race. Other instances of false standards' of morality which are directly traced to false principles are the following: It is considered lawful for divorced persons to contract adulterous marriages ; for doctors ( in some states at least) to procure abortion when the life of the mother is in danger ; ; for married persons to practice birth-con- trol ; for hospital authorities to inflict a painless death on incurables or the hopelessly insane. So also in the bus- iness world is it considered lawful to crush out weaker 15 competitors; to corner commodities necessary for life and arbitrarily to fix the prices of them, and similar prac- tices. In view of the fact that our young people are taught so many false principles which they then translate into daily conduct, can we really affect surprise at the rising tide of lawlessness and immorality that threatens to en- gulf modern society? Hardly. We should rather be surprised if it were otherwise. “As a man sows, so shall he reap”. He who sows the seeds of poisonous plants in his field must not expect to reap a harvest of wheat or corn A nation that allows false principles of con- duct to be instilled in the minds of its young people must in due time reap a bitter harvest of every kind of vice and crime. The words of Sacred Scripture hold true: “He that sows the wind shall reap the whirlwind”. (Osee 8 , 7 .) “DOCTRINES OF DEVILS.” In the epistles of St. Paul and St. Jude we read that in the course of time many false teachers shall appear in the world who will make it their aim to corrupt the purity of the Christian faith. St. Paul says that there shall come dangerous times in which men shall teach “doctrines of devils”; and St. Jude speaks of men who shall be sensual, who walk after their own lusts in ungodliness. Again, St. James warns us against a wisdom which is not from God, but is “earthly, sensual and devilish.” This prediction is certainly fulfilled to the letter in our age. About three quarters of a century ago the world began to he treated to what was hailed as a gospel of de- liverance from the hated gospel of Christ. Self-appointed prophets arose in the name of “science”, and triumph- antly declared that the old faith must now be scrapped, for a new era of enlightenment and liberty had dawned 16 upon the world. A new revelation was given to men which gave the lie to the old with its severe doctrines of the Ten Commandments, of sin, of penance and of a life hereafter with its eternal reward or eternal punishment. But who were the prophets of this new gospel whom the world received with open arms as the saviors of the human race ? They were men like Darwin, Huxley, Vogt* Buechner, and especially Haeckel, so notorious for his dishonest methods. And what did they proclaim? The complete emancipation of the flesh from the law of God and man’s total independence of any authority outside himself and higher than himself. And the world, which is always in rebellion against God and His command- ments, received these false prophets with loud acclaim and applauded them as the greatest benefactors the hu- man race has ever known. We can not here give a full statement of all the errors these men proclaimed in the name of “science”; we can only confine ourselves to an outline of them, together with a summary of the dangers to religion and morals which spring therefrom. These dangers are very serious, because this “creed of false science”, as it has been very appropriately called, has been almost universally adopted into the educational systems of the present time, and in this way has penetrated deep into all classes of society, where it exerts a most profound influence on men’s views of life and on their conduct and morals. A Swann of Errors Let Loose Upon the World This “creed of false science” is nothing else than Ma- terialistic Evolution. A mere theory, unproven and un- provable, is palmed off on the unthinking masses as a fully established fact, and is made the vehicle of unbelief and irreligion. It flatly denies the very existence of im- 17 material or spiritual beings, consequently denies the ex- istence of God and of the human soul. According to it, nothing exists except matter and force. All things, non- living and living, are the products of a blind and pur- poseless evolution. There is no difference between a grain of sand, an oak, an elephant and the genius of a Milton, except a difference of evolution or development. Man who stands at the top of this evolution is a deriva- tive of the lower animals. His thoughts and conscious actions are not the operations of a spiritual soul, but simply the products of the chemical action that is con- tinually going on in his nervous system and brain. “Thought is a secretion of the brain, as bile is of the liver” writes one of the exponents of Evolution. “Vir- tue and vice are chemical products like sugar and vitri- ol”, writes another. From this crude doctrine flow the following errors which are playing havoc with the morals of the world today : 1. Since man has no soul and his actions are the products of chemical changes, he does not possess a free will. What he does, he does by necessity, just as a stone falls and light shines. 2. Since man has no spiritual and immortal soul there can be 'for him no life hereafter. All is over with him when he dies, just as it is with the tree that is felled and the ox that is slain. 3. Since man has no free will, there can be no dif- ference between good and bad actions, between right and wrong, between virtue and vice, between heroic self-sac- rifice and gruesome murder. There is no such thing as sin. 4. Since there is no God, there are no Commandments that man must keep. Whatever a man’s passions crave may be enjoyed with perfect impunity. 18 5. For the same reason there is no fixed and un- changing standard of morality. What so-called stand- ards there are, are simply conventions of society which can be changed at will. 6. Since there is no life hereafter, man must make his heaven here on earth by enjoying all the pleasures within reach. 7. There is no reward or punishment after death. Heaven and hell are non-existent. To sum up : “Materialistic evolution has promoted the rankest naturalism. It rejects the supernatural destiny of man. It makes nature and especially man self-suf- ficient. N'ature is essentially good and all its instincts are legitimate. Original sin is a myth, and a libel on human nature. Distrust of human nature is unjustifiable and precautions against it are superfluous. The grossest violations of God’s law are called experiences and thrills. In a world holding such principles modesty and chas- tity will be entirely out of place’’. (Cf. Homiletic Re- view, Dec. 1924, page 228.) Such, in outline, are the “doctrines of devils” foisted upon the world in the name of “science” for the last few decades. Who is there that can fail to see at a glance that the unceasing inculcation of these teachings into the minds of our young people must by an iron ne- cessity produce the fruits of rankest immorality? This materialistic interpretation of human life is taught in nearly all the non-Catholic institutions of • learning throughout the land, and young men and women are solemnly assured that they have a perfect right to enjoy all the animal pleasures that this life has in store for them. Is it any wonder, then, that we hear so much of an alarmingly rapid decline of morality, and that the vice of impurity is assuming menacing proportions among the young men and women of the land ? They have been 19 taught that they are of animal origin; why should the}' not feel free to live like animals? As an illustration of what pernicious teachings are dis- pensed to some of our young people we quote the fol- lowing : “Within the last few years innumerable books and magazine articles have been written by women, some of them professors in well-known colleges, advocating prin- ciples which would completely destroy civilization as we know it. Before a group of mentally immature sopho- mores and juniors one professor inculcates the advan- tage of the “companionate”, which in plainer English, means the license of free love. A second argues for a wider extension of the already disgracefully loose divorce laws, forgetting that when the bars are thrown down, woman suffers* while predatory man goes on—to a new conquest. A third, under the plea of “the fullest expres- sion of personality” urges lines of conduct which unless practised with consummate care, will assuredly end in the reformatory or penitentiary” (or insane asylum). — America , January 8th 1927. Who Is To Blame? It is universally admitted that there is an alarming growth of depravity among our young people. Condi- tions in many high schools and universities are reported to be simply appalling. Public dance-halls, bathing places and pleasure resorts have become places of wholesale con- tagion of immorality. Our reformatories, jails and pris- ons are fast filling up with youthful offenders and crim- inals. In view of this sad state of affairs the question is frequently asked: “Who is to blame?” And the answer that is commonly given, is: “Why, none other than the parents”. “The parents are to blame ; why do they not train their children right?” Who is there that has not heard 20 this remark made time and again? But it is true that all blame attaches to the parents? We admit that they are largely responsible for the waywardness of the young people. They will have a very severe account to render on the Day of Judgment. But do those who try to fix all the blame on the parents ever reflect that very many of the parents of today are men and women who them- selve were brought up without religious training? Sec- ular, that is Godless and religionless, Education, has been in vogue long enough to give us three or four gen- erations of persons, who, as far as religious knowledge is concerned, differ in nothing from untutored pagans. And surely no one expects that parents who have had no re- ligious training themselves are going to make well in- structed Christians out of the children that are now in turn entrusted to their care! We must remember that the knowledge of religion is not inherited any more than is the knowledge of a language or of a science. It can be imparted only by means of proper teaching. Where this is for any reason neglected, parents will have a progeny of young pagans growing up around them. Hence, though we admit that the parents of today bear a large share of blame in respect to the wayward- ness of our youth* we maintain that there is another class of persons who bear a still greater share of this blame. And who are these ? They are the men who have introduced and who are sponsoring the present God- less system of education—educators, politicians, states- men and law makers and all who have anything to do with its workings. These are the men who have com- mitted the greater sin before God ; these are the nation's greatest criminals and worst enemies. A Striking Comparison If a group of men banded together for the foul pur- pose of creating crevasses in the levees of the lower Miss- 21 issippi when the river is at flood stage, they would not only demolish in a short time a protective structure which required many years for its completion and involved the expenditure of vast sums of money, but they would also directly cause an enormous loss of property, not to men- tion the loss of life that would very likely follow. The work of destroying the levees would take but a fraction of the time and labor needed for their erection ; and once the breaks are made, ruin and devastation become inevi- table. Who is there that would not condemn such men as execrable criminals for whom no sort of punishment could be too severe? Now the restraining levees of the moral order which hold the turbulent passions of men in check are the Ten Commandments and the maxims and principles of Chris- tian conduct as taught by the Catholic Church. It was by means of these that she Christianized and civilized the pagan nations of antiquity. Then there arose, during the last two centuries, a horde of godless men, who, filled with an insane hatred of the Church, made it their wicked task to demolish what the Church had so labor- iously built up. One of the most effective tools they em- ployed in this work of destruction was Goddess educa- tion, made compulsory by law. By this means they suc- ceeded in tearing down the moral levees built by the Church, and as a consequence it has become the sad lot of the people now living, that they must deplore the havoc created by the inundations of crime and immor- ality all over the country. If we can rely on the United States Census reports, there are in the country no less than sixty million per- sons who belong to no church—they are pagans. How shall we account for this terrible condition, when we know that the great majority of these are descendants of ancestors who came to this country as Catholics and Protestants,—that is, as Christians? Is not education 22 without religion, perhaps, the mightiest factor in this process of de-Christianizing and paganizing the nation? Less than a hundred years of this iniquitous system have sufficed to banish all knowledge of God from the hearts of millions. And what before God is the status of the promoters of this nefarious work? Their crime is not of the com- mon kind. It is a far more heinous one than that of the murderer who slays for money or revenge. Their 3in is that of wholesale scandal. No punishment can be too severe for that. And indeed our Lord pronounces their doom: “Woe to him that shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in me. It were better for him that a mill-stone should be hanged about his neck, and he be drowned in the depth of the sea. It is necessary that scandal should come ; but nevertheless woe to him by whom the scandal cometh’\ And there is no scandal greater than that of God-less education by which whole nations are estranged from God and delivered over to the power of Satan. WHAT IS THE REMEDY? But is there no remedy for the great evils that afflict modern society and threaten its very existence? Is there no means of arresting their progress? No means of turning aside the tide of immorality that menaces the welfare of the race? No means of averting the impend-* ing doom? Thoughtful men all over the country, statesmen, legisla- tors, educators and lovers of the nation in general are alarmed at the rapid progress which lawlessness has been making within the last quarter of a century, and they realize that something must be done soon, if our civiliza- tion is to be preserved from sharing the fate which over- took the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome. But, strange to say, while these men fully recognize the magnitude of the evils from which society is suffer- ing, they seem to be struck with complete blindness when they turn to consider the causes by which they are pro- duced, and the remedies which must be applied to re- move them. In many respects these would-be-saviors of society resemble the physicians of the days prior to Pas- teur's famous discovery that contagious diseases are caused by specific germs. From a lack of proper knowl- edge they were helpless in the presence of virulent epi- demics. They did indeed prescribe all kinds of reme- dies, but it was in a haphazard fashion and without suc- cess, in most cases at least. And indeed, in the light of modern medicine, of what earthly use could it be to administer even the most drastic remedies in an attempt to stamp out an epidemic of cholera or typhoid, when, for want of better knowledge, the water or milk supply was allowed to continue to swarm with death-dealing bacteria by the millions? Now it is in a very similar position that our statesmen find themselves when they try to combat the moral epi- demics that are sweeping over the country. They rec- ommend all kinds of nostrums and try to have them ad- ministered by a process of law ; but in the meantime the bacteria which produce these epidemics are allowed to continue unchecked and exert their destructive influence without the least intereference. While they are deplor- ing the depravity and lawlessness of the age* our young men and women continue to be indoctrinated with God-' less views of life—the knowledge of God being wholly eliminated from their training—and they are encour- aged to. make the most of the sensual enjoyment which this world can afford. Are they cursed With blindness that they can not see how an education without God must, by an iron necessity, produce a race of men and women who trample on all the sacred traditions of the 2 4 past, flout all conventions, laugh at sin, mock at virtue and insist on extracting all the animal enjoyment possible out of their brief earthly existence?* In this way it happens that while older people are hor- rified and wondering where all- this lawlessness will end, the stream of life continues to be polluted at its very source by the deadly virus of God-less and Religion-less education. It has been stated that many remedies have been sug- gested for the cure of the evils of the times. Among them is the introduction of religious teaching in our com- mon schools. This remedy, it must be admitted, is the best that has been proposed so far. For, as it is religion* and religion alone, that has transformed the pagan and barbarous nations of antiquity into Christian ones and given them a high degree of civilization, so also is it re- ligion, and religion alone, that is able to infuse new life into a diseased and dying civilization and restore it to its erstwhile flourishing condition. Difficulties in the Way But here we run up against a difficulty which appar- ently is simply insurmountable. It is one thing to diag- nose the disease and to know and recommend the reme- dy that will cure it, and quite another to have that rem- edy applied and tried out. When there is question of introducing the teaching of religion into the schools of “Flaming youth on the rampage! From New York to San Francisco the colleges have been shocked by the “out- rageous actions” of their students. Deans indignant, parents paralyzed, the police penalizing while the public looks on in horrified amazement at the suc- cession of scandals that have taken place in the schools of learning throughout the country from coast to coast. In the very shadow of the ancient, ivy-clad walls of Har- vard University, one of the oldest and most honored seats of learning in the land, young student-editors printed a maga- zine which so outraged the proprieties that the law was forced to step in and suppress it.”—St. Louis “Globe-Democrat,” May 24 , 1025 , 25 the country, a vast array of obstacles stare us in the face. Let us explain them briefly. It is conceded on all sides that only religion can save the world. But now there are many so-called religions, all claiming to possess the truth and all clamoring for a hearing. To which of these has God given the power and efficacy of salvation? Which of them has received from Him the commission to heal the nations? It surely can not be entrusted to all of them* for no two teach the same doctrine and in many things they contradict each other flatly. But the truths of religion must be as fixed and unchanging as those of mathematics, to say the least. Hence we must conclude that either all of them are wrong, or that only one of them can be right and all the rest must lie wrong. If only one can be right, which of them is it? Ts it the Catholic, or Episcopalian, or Presbyterian, or Baptist, or Methodist, or Mormon, or Christian Science, or some other one? Which one of the several hundred forms of religion which have sprung up within the last four hundred years possesses God’s truth whole and entire* and must therefore be taught our rising generations that society may be saved from the ruin which threatens it? Back to the Ancient Faith It was a very evil and bitter day for the once Chris- tian nations when they broke away from the unity of faith, and renounced their allegiance to the Church of Jesus Christ, to which their forefathers had clung for many centuries. A calamitous event it was for them to have turned their backs on the one church which God has given to the world for its salvation, and embraced new forms of religion—religions which are, every single one of them, man-made and owe their existence to men who were by no means models of virtue and holiness of life. It is certainly a very odd coincidence that the two great 26 Protestant bodies (from which all the newer sects have sprung), trace their origin to men who were notorious for their gross ‘immorality. Both Luther and Henry VIII left a very unsavory record for moral depravity. And can any serious-minded man for one moment believe that religions begotten of vile passions should have in them the power of healing the festering wounds of so- ciety ? As a necessary result then of the religious revolution of the sixteenth century which destroyed the unity of faith that had existed up to that time, and gave us sects by the hundreds, the world finds itself today in what we can only call an impossible position. What we mean by that is the following : Jesus Christ came into the world to save it. He estab- lished His Church to carry on the work of sanctifying individuals, families and nations. This work was to be continued by her uninterruptedly down to the end of time. To no other religion or “Church” was it entrusted. No other religion possesses the truth and grace necessary for its successful accomplishment. All others are intru- ders and mischief breeders,, “thieves and robbers”* and “wolves in sheep’s clothing”, as our Lord calls them. Large masses, however, of people, even whole nations, insist that these man-made religions, and not the religion of Jesus Christ, possess the power of salvation. They will not only have nothing to do with the Catholic Church, but they hate her and demand her retirement from activity in the affairs of the world. They would annihilate her if they could. Like the Jews on Good Friday they are continually clamoring for her speedy death. The Remedy Rejected It therefore amounts to this : The one great remedy which God in His infinite mercy and compassion has 27 given tbe human race as an infallible cure for its spiritual and temporal maladies, is wilfully and cold-bloodedly re- jected, and countless quack substitutes are tried to save a decadent society. The only physician who is able to effect a sure cure is not even admitted to the case. No wonder the patient grows visibly worse from day to day. This then explains the insurmountable difficulties ex- perienced when there is question of teaching religion in the schools. It is impossible to teach all known forms ; it is equally impossible to select only one and then force all the children to learn it; and most of all, the teaching of the Catholic religion is altogether out of question. In addition to this, certain godless and irreligious elements avail themselves of these difficulties to emphasize the necessity of education without any religious coloring, and thereby bring about what they so ardently desire, namely the de-christianizing of the people and their total estrangement from, the acknowledgement of God’s su- preme authority. As Cardinal Manning writes : “The whole power of ‘modern progress and civiliza- tion’ is at this moment attempting to accomplish four things : first, to expunge God from science ; 2. to drive His name out of education, from the highest to the low- est school ; 3. to shut out His revealed Law from the whole public order of States ; 4. to shut out His revealed Law from the whole culture of the human intellect. ” — The Internal Mission of the Holy GhosU P. 151. What, then, are we to do? Confronted by this sad state of affairs we can do noth- ing better than adopt the following policy : As fearlessly as St. John the Baptist proclaimed before the incestuous Herod the sanctity of marriage, we must proclaim to an apostate world the following hard truths (so that at least all “men of good will” can learn what is 28 for their salvation) : Only in the truth and grace -of Jesus Christ as dispensed in the Catholic Church lies the hope of the world’s salvation. There is only one thing that can save the nations and that is their return to the ancient faith which was lost to them in the course of the past four centuries. If they repent and return to God, He will pardon, bless and prosper them ; but if they persist in their wilful rejection of His truth and their refusal to submit to the Church which He established for their sal- vation, they render themselves guilty of a grievous sin against the Holy Ghost, which in turn drags after it most terrible punishments. Sins of the spirit are more heinous in the sight of God than are sins of the flesh, and con- sequently are punished more severely. Apostate nations sink not merely to the level of pagan ones, but far below that level. This truth is taught by our Lord in His Parable of the return of the devil with seven other spirits more wicked than himself. "When the unclean spirit is gone out from a man he walketh through places without water, seeking rest, and not finding (rest)» he saith : I will return into my house whence I came out. And when he is come, he findeth it swept and garnished. Then he goeth and taketh with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and entering in, they dwell there. And the last state of that man becomes worse than the first.” (Luke 9, 24). The one unclean spirit that possessed the nations was paganism. This was cast out by the preaching of the Gospel and the establishment of Christianity. Then came the gradual and progressive departure of the na- tions from the unity of the Christian faith during the last four hundred years which marks the return of the devil with "seven other spirits more wicked than him- self,” inasmuch as there is now an alarming growth of absolute unbelief and the complete rejection of all things supernatural. 29 This is indeed a terrible punishment. And no wonder. The wilful rejection of the true Church is the wilful rejection of one of Gods greatest and best gifts to man- kind. And who will not say that this rejection is a most heinous sin, a deliberate insult offered to the God of all truth and all goodness? To nations that are guilty of this sin, these words of the Prophet apply : '‘The na- tion and the kingdom that will not serve Thee, shall per- ish.” (Isaias 6, 11). Let apostate nations therefore take heed and beware. God's threats of punishment are as true as are His promises of reward. JESUS CHRIST, THE* ONLY HOPE The conclusion to be drawn from all that has been said in these pages is none other than this: There is no rem- edy for the ills of society except in a return of the na- tions to the Church of Jesus Christ. Man-made relig- ions are futile. All wilful adhesion to a false teaching is sinful ; and what is sinful can not have the power of spiritual cure. Only truth and grace can save society from dissolution. Let the nations give the Church of Christ a chance to exercise in an untrammelled manner her beneficent influence ; let them give her freedom of action ; and let men willingly bow their necks to the sweet yoke of the Gospel; and all will in a short time be well again with the world which is now sick unto death and writhing in agony of pain. But if her services are spurned and her truth and grace rejected, then there is no hope of recovery. This great truth is stated in so clear and convincing a manner by the great Cardinal Manning (himself a convert from Anglicanism), in his work entitled "The Four Great Evils of the Day”, that we shall here quote the entire passage by way of conclusion. "There is no hope for man or for society but in return- ing to God, There is no other hope. There is nothing 30 but God on which the soul can rest, on which society can stand. The most perfect legislation, the most refined human laws, the most acute human philosophy, political economy, benevolence, and beneficence in all its forms, all the social sciences of which we hear so much—all these are powerless without God. “The most finished time-piece in which every articu- lation is complete and perfect, can not strike one note or measure one moment unless a living hand communicate to it the fund of motion which it afterwards exhausts. The mightiest machine that will lift a hammer of sur- passing weight, break *bars of iron, or cut them as if they were the branches of the fir tree, the most wonder- ful structures of mechanical skill, are nothing until the momentum is given and that momentum must be sought elsewhere. “Mechanics can do nothing without dynamical powers, and these dynamical powers, for men and for society, are to be found in God alone. They can be found only in Him to whose image man is made ; they can be found nowhere but in His truth, which is the key of the human intellect, and in His grace which is the only hand that can touch the heart of man; and if this be so, they can be found only in Christianity. “Neither adults nor children can be touched by the laws of states, except externally. The state may control the external actions of man—it can imprison, it can fine, it can inflict capital punishment ; but it can not convert the sinner, nor change the will, nor illuminate the intel- lect, nor guide the conscience, nor shape the character. It can not educate the child. All this is internal, not ex- ternal ; it is not mechanism ; it belongs to the living powers of the soul; and God alone by truth and grace, can ac- complish this work in man.” Page 129. The system of Godless education has been tried out and found to be a terrible engine of destruction. JL (&. 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