Page:The Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII.djvu/575



REVIEW OF HIS PONTIFICATE. 569

man to God. Blessed by the Lord, Our word has been able to increase and to strengthen the convictions of a great number of men; to throw light on their minds in the difficult questions of the day; to stimulate their zeal and to advance the various works which have been un- dertaken.

It is especially for the disinherited classes that these works have been inaugurated, and have continued to grow in every country, as is evident from the increase of Christian charity which has always found in the midst of the people its favorite field of action. If the harvest has not been more abundant. Venerable Brothers, let us adore God who is mysteriously just and beg Him, at the same time, to have pity on the blindness of so many souls, to whom unhappily the terrifying word of the Apostle may be addressed: The god of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers, that the light of the Gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, shoidd not shine to them}

The more the Catholic Church devotes itself to extend its zeal for the moral and material advancement of the peoples, the more the children of darkness arise in hatred against it and have recourse to every means in their power to tarnish its divine beauty and paralyze its action of life-giving reparation. How many false reasonings have they not made and how many calumnies have they not spread against it! Among their most perfidious devices is that which consists in repeating to the ignorant masses and to suspicious governments that the Church is opposed to the progress of science, that it is hostile to liberty, that the rights of the State are usurped by it and that politics is a field which it is constantly invading. Such are the mad accusations that have been a thousand times repudiated and a thousand times refuted by sound reason and by history and, in fact, by every man who has a heart foi honesty and a mind for truth.

1 2 Cor. iv. 4,