Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/640

622 each, one is free to follow them if he sees fit, provided, however, that such or such a fashion may not be generally recognized as a mark of adhesion to a bad class. The garb of a hangman or of an assassin may not be scandalous in itself, but no honorable and respectable man would clothe himself as an assassin or hangman in order to be in fashion. In like manner "wise and Christian persons ought to be ashamed to imitate in their apparel the liberals and liberal philosophers, and, for this reason, whoever nowadays under the pretext of adapting his dress to the mode plasters his face with those demi-periwigs, shows signs of little honesty, or at least of little sense."

This is a fair specimen of the puerility of the archbishop's reasoning. He then proceeds to discuss the origin and nature of human society, which, he maintains, is a divine institution, and began to exist essentially in its present constitution with the creation of man. The theory of a primitive state of savagery, out of which the race was gradually evolved, he denounces as a figment of the imagination, having no more reality than the dog with seven heads or the sea-creature half fish and half maiden described by the poets. "Modern philosophers, for their own base ends, have feigned to believe in such a state of nature, as they call it, whereas it should be called a state contrary and repugnant to nature." The moral which the Right Reverend Apuzzo draws from his doctrine is, that society being an institution established by God, man has no right to change it under the pretext of reform or by the force of revolution, thus impiously endeavoring, by overturning the thrones of divinely appointed kings, and subverting the social, civil, and religious arrangements which God has ordained, to improve upon the wisdom of the Omniscient.

As regards liberty, he says it would be madness and blasphemy to maintain that the freedom of the gospel has anything in common with the freedom preached by modern philosophers. What the redemption of Christ freed man from was the condemnation and slavery of sin, and from the dominion of the devil. "Before his advent, demons tormented and afflicted the human race in a thousand ways, but Jesus Christ so effectually released mankind from that scourge, and so conquered the power of hell, that nowadays one scarcely knows that there are any such creatures as demons." Was ever any utterance of even the clerical mind more naïve than this! All aspirations and struggles for a freedom differing from his definition of the freedom of the gospel he denounces as destructive of human happiness and offensive to the Saviour of the world.

In the chapter on equality, we are told that men are tall, short, smart, stupid, learned, ignorant, virtuous, vicious, rich, poor, strong, and feeble, and that it is therefore impossible for them