Page:Pastoral Letter Promulgating the Jubilee - Spalding.djvu/14

Rh progress he had made through a portion of his States—since snatched from him, alas! by the rapacious violence of a neighbor powerful as he was unscrupulous; and the fifth is that now proclaimed, to awaken the attention of all Christendom to the torrent of pestilent errors, which are now prevailing, and threatening to overwhelm the Church, and along with it, all civil society; and to unite all the faithful followers of Christ in one general and earnest supplication to God, that He would mercifully interpose to control the storm, and avert the impending danger.

Civil society may be subverted and may fall into anarchy and ruin, for civil society is but human; but the Church is divine and immortal; built on a rock by a divine Architect, it is guarantied from destruction by His infallible promise, that "the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." The passions of the wicked and the powerful may be unchained against it, and their evil machinations may appear for a time to be on the point of compassing its destruction; their shouts of anticipated triumph may even ring through the world; but, in the end, they are themselves dashed to pieces against that rock, which has stood firm and unshaken amidst the storms of eighteen centuries, and their premature boasting is sure to be turned into the humiliation and confusion of defeat. It has been so for eighteen hundred years; it will be so, "all days, even to the consummation of the world!" He who built this everlasting Church—always "doomed to death, but ever fated not to die"—has said: "Heaven and earth may pass away, but My word shall not pass away." "Why," then, "have the gentiles raged and the people devised vain things? The kings of the earth stood up, and the princes met together, against the Lord, and against His Christ. Let us break their bonds asunder; and let us cast away their yoke from us. He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh at them, and the Lord shall laugh them to scorn!" (Psalm ii., 1—4.)