Page:The Decrees of the Vatican Council.djvu/21

 Rh which opposes itself in every way to the Christian religion as a supernatural institution, and works with the utmost zeal in order that, after, our sole and , has been excluded from the minds of men, and from the life and moral acts of nations, the reign of what they call pure reason or nature may be established. And after forsaking and rejecting the Christian religion, and denying the true and His, the minds of many have sunk into the abyss of Pantheism, Materialism and Atheism, until, denying rational nature itself, and every sound rule of right, they labour to destroy the deepest foundations of human society.

Unhappily, it has yet further come to pass that, while this impiety prevailed on every side, many, even of the children of the Catholic Church, have strayed from the path of true piety; and by the gradual diminution of the truths they held, the Catholic sense has become weakened in them. For led away by various and strange doctrines, wrongly confusing nature and grace, human science and divine faith, they are found to deprave the true sense of the doctrines which our holy Mother Church holds and teaches, and to endanger the integrity and the soundness of the faith.

Considering these things, how can the Church fail to be deeply stirred? For, even as wills all men to be saved, and to arrive at the knowledge of the truth; even as  came to save what had perished and to gather together the children of  who had been dispersed, so the Church, constituted by  the mother and teacher of all nations, knows its own 2