Part 3 (1/2)
”Latin Christianity is responsible for the condition and progress of Europe from the fourth to the sixteenth century,” and subsequently avers, ”Whoever will, in in a spirit of impartiality, examine what had been done by Catholicism for the intellectual and n, and what has been done by science in its brief period of action, can, I am persuaded, co a comparison, he has established a contrast” (”Conflict,” p 321) Lecky, in his ”History of Morals,” vol 2, p 18, tells us:--”For ical influence has been one of the ress In medicine, physical science, commercial interests, politics, and even ethics, the reforical affirmations that have barred his hich were all defended as of vital importance, and were all co influence of civilization” (Protestant as well as Catholic Christianity is, however, obnoxious to this stricture of Lecky)
The Freethinkers ”striving to replunge the world into the depths of barbarism!” What can the Archbishop's idea of barbaris is ”barbarismas of his infallible Church
If, however, barbarishtened and highest civilization in Art, Science, Literature and Ethics, it will, I have the presumption to think, be found that those ”foolishthe van of progress forward to a higher civilization, instead of dragging it backward to barbarism The truth of this is patent everywhere, in every civilized country, and h Archbishop Lynch yman of Toronto--Rev W S Rainsford, of St James' Cathedral--(froht probably, to his advantage, take a lesson in toleration), in a ser of Freethinkers, e, as reported in the _Globe_ of the 18th:
”This sort of infidelity, that of Materialism, has its students in the laboratory and in the library It includes men of moral lives, of earnest purposes,men who uphold morality, chastity, self-denial, perseverance with as clear a voice as Christians do, but on different grounds”
Years ago the N Y _Independent_, a religious paper, enuous admission:
”To the shame of the Church it must be confessed that the foremost in all our philanthropic e, in the practical application of genuine Christianity, in the reforh and low places, in the vindication of the rights of s, in the intellectual and eneration of the race, are the so-called infidels in our land The Church has pusillani oar, but the very reins of salutary reform in the hands of men she denounces as ini, with all theirfor Christ's sake; and if they succeed, as succeed they will, in abolishi+ng slavery, banishi+ng ru the masses, then must the recoil on Christianity be disastrous Woe, oe, to Christianity when Infidels by the force of nature, or the tendency of the age, get ahead of the Church in morals, and in the practical work of Christianity In some instances they are already far in advance In the vindication of Truth, Righteousness, and Liberty, _they are the pioneers_, beckoning to a sluggish Church to follow in the rear”
The _Evangelist_ also,all the earnest ht and action in America, we venture to say that four-fifths are skeptical of the great historical facts of Christianity What is held as Christian doctrine by the churches claieneral distrust of the clergy, as a class, and an utter disgust with the very aspect of modern Christianity and of church worshi+p This scepticism is not flippant; little is said about it It is not a peculiarity alone of radicals and fanatics; most of the to no class of ultraists It is not worldly and selfish Nay, the doubters lead in the bravest andenterprises of the day”
From a Church which has always opposed the education of the people, when she had the power, and exterminated or expatriated the best intellects under her jurisdiction, this talk of Freethinkers ”re-plunging the world into the depths of barbarisrace from his Grace of Toronto By this Church the Moriscoes were driven out of Spain--100,000 of theress, of art and science Buckle, the historian, tells us:--”When they were thrust out of Spain there was no one to fill their places; arts and enerated or were entirely lost, ard iions of arable land were left uncultivated; whole districts were suddenly deserted, and down to the present day have never been repeopled” The Jews also were expelled, as they, too, were in favor of knowledge and improvement, and this was sufficient cause for their expatriation
This relentless enee a the people, ruthlessly exterrasp for centuries Darwin, in his ”Descent of Man,” vol 1, p 171-2, says:--
”During the same period the Holy Inquisition selected with extreme care the freest and boldest men in order to burn and imprison them In Spain alone some of the bestand questioning there can be no progress--were eli three centuries at the rate of a thousand a year”
Talk to us of barbarisaniso, when she burnt the Alexandrian Libraries and Museuacies of centuries--to the present time, has never yet called off her sleuth-hounds hich she has always hunted down the sacred principles of liberty of thought and freedo of that unhappy contest,” as Mosheiion and philosophy, piety and genius, which increased in succeeding ages, and is prolonged even to our times with a violence which renders it extreht to a conclusion,” to this day, would hold the world in barbarous ignorance if its paralyzed hand could but avail against the resistlessof the condition of the people under Catholicity in the 14th century, thus pictures the civilizing (?) and elevating influences of that Holy Religion:--
”There was no far reaching, no persistent plan to a was done to favor their intellectual development, indeed, on the contrary, it was the settled policy to keep thenorant Century after century passed away, and left the peasantry but little better than the cattle in the fieldsPestilences were permitted to stalk forth unchecked, or at best opposed only by , inadequate shelter, were suffered to produce their result, and at the end of a thousand years the population of Europe had not doubled”
For centuries, and centuries, in the Western Empire, subsequent to the invasion of the barbarians, when the Church this Toronto prelate owes allegiance to, had absolute control, such was the dense ignorance that scarcely a layn his own na, and what little there was the clergy carefully and jealously confined to themselves; and as Hallanorance overspread the whole face of the church, hardly broken by a few glihts, e al darkness” The saes, p 460,) tells us:--”France reached her lowest point at the beginning of the eighth century, but England was, at that tiradation until thecentury In aly forms a subject for reproach It is asserted by one held in 992 that scarcely a single person was to be found in Rome itself, who knew the first elements of letters Not one priest of a thousand in Spain, about the age of Charlene, could address a common letter of salutation to one another”
Lecky, in his ”History of Morals,” vol 2, p 222, tells us that:
”Mediaeval Catholicity discouraged and suppressed, in every way, secular studies,” and further, that, ”Not till the education of Europe passed from the monasteries to the universities; not until Mahoht and industrial independence broke the sceptre of the Church, did the intellectual revival of Europe commence”
And, I would ask Archbishop Lynch, as the condition of the Byzantine E the thousand years or upwards of its existence?--An empire under the sway of his Church, from its foundation by the first Christian emperor, Constantine--that exean priests refused him absolution for his enormities, hastened to the bosom of the Christian Church, whose priests he found ranting absolution to the new proselyte What is the record of history touching this Eis of Catholic Christianity? The historian Lecky thus graphically sets forth its condition:--
”The universal verdict of history is that it constitutes, without a single exception, the hly base and despicable forh very cruel and very sensual, there have been times when cruelty assuant aspects, but there has been no other enduring civilization so absolutely destitute of all the forreatness, and none to which the epithet _mean_ may be so emphatically applied The Byzantine Ee of treachery Its vices were the vices ofto be virtuous
The history of the eues of priests, eunuchs and woratitude, of perpetual fratricides” In speaking of the condition of the Western Empire the saence of opinion was united with an equally boundless toleration of all falsehood and deliberate fraud, that could favor received opinions Credulity being taught as a virtue, and all conclusions dictated by authority, a deadly torpor sank upon the human mind, which for many centuries almost suspended its action, and was only broken by the scrutinizing, innovating and free-thinking habits that accompanied the rise of the industrial republics in Italy Few men who are not either priests or monks would not have preferred to live in the best days of the Athenian or of the Roe of the Antonines rather than in any period that elapsed between the _triumph of Christianity and the fourteenth century_”
The same historian, whose accuracy Archbishop Lynch will scarcely attempt to impeach, thus judicially and impartially sums up the influences of Catholic Christianity both in the Eastern and Western E many centuries when it had the fullest sway:--
”When we re power of theology was tried in a new capital, free froan traditions, and for more than one thousand years unsubdued by barbarians, and that in the west, the Church, for at least seven hundred years after the shocks of the invasion had subsided, exercised a control ency has ever attained, it will appear, I think, that the experiue of the glaring vices of antiquity, and to contrast thes; but, if we desire to form a just estimate of the realized improvement, we must compare the classical and ecclesiastical civilizations as wholes, and must observe in each case not only the vices that were repressed but also the degree and variety of positive excellence attained”
Before the art of printing was discovered, the Church had less difficulty in keeping the people in ignorance, but after the invention of that boon to mankind she found herself ominously confronted with the tree of life from which the people would soon learn to pluck the fruit of knowledge Hence the establishment, by Pope Paul IV, about the atorius_, whose functions, we are told, was ”to examine books and manuscripts intended for publication, and to decide whether the people may be permitted to read them” This is what his Grace of St Michael's Palace, in Toronto, proposes to do for the good Catholics of that city--decide what they shall read and what they shall not read, as though they were ninnies and not able to decide that matter for theance and assuh such ether inconsistent with the spirit of this age, and ludicrously out of place in 1880, in the City of Toronto, it, nevertheless, perfectly accords with the tenets and spirit as well as the antecedents of his Church; which, while it accuses Freethinkers of ”barbarision, and tolerates no freedom of conscience: And what is this but barbarisory XVI as insane folly, and the Archbishop of Toronto reiterates this unsavory stigy never learns The Church changes not How can she when she is infallible? Yet an infallible Pope of an infallible Church, not long since, found himself, while encompassed with many difficulties, spiritual and temporal, to be about like other weak h infallible, remember, and with the power of ly coar world that he is ”a prisoner in his own palace in Rome!” And the heretical and sceptical world--the ”outside barbarians”--with a conteerent on Earth” of an all-powerful God being obliged so easily to succumb to heresy--to a little temporal power Such, however, is life--or rather the ”h, as Cromwell observed, to be on the side of the heaviest artillery,--not the artillery of heaven, but the base artillery of earth Indeed, this worldly artillery--the artillery of science and civilization--has, in this nineteenth century, beena _dead dog_; when the Holy Catholic Church finds it imperatively incumbent upon her to attempt a resuscitation This happened in Roreat Ecumenical Council--that unique anachronism of the nineteenth century I know not whether that mediaeval assembly of Holy ”Fathers in God” was honored by the presence of his Grace of St Michael's Palace, in Toronto, or not; but, be that as it may, his reverence's entire loyalty to the notorious Encyclical and Syllabus of that Council is not to be questioned or doubted The miniature Toronto _bull_ of May 9th, 1880, has the true Vatican ring of the big _bull_ of the Council in Roh harmless, _anathema_, Atheism, Pantheism, Naturalism, Rationalisma By the ful s, that ”No one may interpret the Sacred Scriptures contrary to the sense in which they are interpreted by Holy Mother Church, to whos”
It was further decreed that ”All the Christian faithful are not only forbidden to defend, as legitimate conclusions of science, those opinions which are known to be contrary to the doctrine of faith, especially when condemned by the Church, but are rather absolutely bound to hold the the deceitful appearance of truth”
As examples of the holy canons which were actually fulated by that Ecumenical Council in the latter part of this 19th century, here are a few:--
”Who shall refuse to receive, for sacred and canonical, the books of Holy Scripture in their integrity, with all their parts, according as they were enumerated by the Holy Council of Trent, or shall deny that they are inspired by God, _Let hiht to be pursued in such a spirit of freedom that one may be allowed to hold as true their assertions, even when opposed to revealed doctrine, _Let him be anathema_”
”Who shall say that it ress of science, that the doctrines set forth by the Church must be taken in another sense than that in which the Church has ever received and yet receives them, _Let him be anathema_”
These are the e; and a prelate of that Church breathes the same noxious vapors forth into the intellectual atmosphere of the City of Toronto! It remains to be seen whether in Toronto there are such slaves or fools as will subent Catholics put their necks in a yoke so galling? None but slaves or barbarians would do it The Archbishop would thus fain make barbarians of his own people, and then he would have the pagans at ho Freethinkers for theave it as his opinion that any ed to, or what country he lived in--who claihts for himself which he denied to others, is a barbarian! Now, according to this definition, who are the barbarians? The Freethinkers, or the Archbishop hie?