Page:The Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII.djvu/578



572 REVIEW OF HIS PONTIFICATE.

have more than once employed as a pretext to conceal their own purposes of oppression.

Far from oppressing the State, histoiy clearly shows when it is read without prejudice, that the Church like its divine Founder has been, on the contrary, most commonly the victim of oppression and injustice. The reason is that its power rests not on the force of arms but on the strength of thought and of truth.

It is therefore assuredly with malignant purpose that they hurl against the Church accusations like these. It is a pernicious and disloyal work, in the pursuit of which above all others a certain sect of darkness is engaged, a sect which human society these many years carries within itself and which like a deadly poison destroys its happiness, its fecundity, and its life. Abiding personification of the revolution, it constitutes a sort of retrogressive society whose object is to exercise an occult suzerainty over the established order and whose whole purpose is to make war against God and against His Church. There is no need of naming it, for all will recognize in these traits the society of Freemasons, of which We have already spoken, expressly in Our Encyclical Humanum Germs of the twentieth of April, 1884. Wliile denouncing its destruc- tive tendency, its erroneous teachings, and its wicked purpose of embracing in its far-reaching grasp almost all nations, and uniting itself to other sects which its secret influence puts in motion, directing first and afterwards retaining its members by the advantages which it pro- cures for them, bending governments to its will, sometimes by promises and sometimes by threats, it has succeeded in entering all classes of society, and forms an invisible and irresponsible state existing within the legitimate State. Full of the spirit of Satan who, according to the words of the Apostle, knows how to transform hunself at need into an angel of light, it gives prominence to its hiunani- tarian object, but it sacrifices everything to its sectarian purpose and protests that it has no political aim, while