Page:Pastoral Letter Promulgating the Jubilee - Spalding.djvu/18

Rh of these same Naturalists, who, impatient of all restraint, whether human or divine, seek to banish God and His eternal truth and justice from human society:—

"And since Religion has been excluded from civil society, and the doctrine and authority of divine Revelation repudiated, or the true and germane notion of justice and human right obscured and lost, and material or brute force substituted in the place of true justice and legitimate right, it is easy to perceive why some persons, forgetting and trampling upon the most certain principles of sound reason, dare cry out together, 'that the will of the people, manifested by what they call public opinion, or in any other way, constitutes the the supreme law, independent of all divine and human right, and that, in the political order, consummated facts, by the very fact that they are consummated, have the force of right.' But who does not see and plainly understand, that the society of men, freed from the bonds of Religion and true justice, can certainly have no other purpose than the effort to obtain and accumulate wealth, and that in its actions it follows no other law than that of the uncurbed cupidity which seeks to secure its own pleasures and comforts?" (P. 6.)

He goes on portraying these wicked men, whom he designates successively, Naturalists, Socialists, and Communists, setting forth their inveterate hatred of Religious Families (Conventual Establishments), whose rich possessions, so long devoted to the purposes of charity and learning, they ardently covet; their opposition to generous Catholic charity, evidenced by their openly announced wish, "that citizens and the Church should be deprived of the privilege of openly bestowing alms for the sake of charity;" and their manifest hatred of all Religion, exhibited in their desire to see abolished the wise Christian law, "by which, to afford facilities for the worship of God, servile works are prohibited on certain days;" finally, their favorite theory, "that domestic society, or the family, derives from the civil law alone all its rights of existence, and that consequently, all the right of parents over their children, and particularly the right of instruction and education, flows from and depends upon the civil law alone.' (Pp. 6 and 7.)