By Henry Aloysius Barry
The dominant fact of the world is the perpetuity of the Church. Every other institution under the sun has undergone organic variation, if not utter extinction. But the Church has not compromised on the point of her deposit of faith. In the very teeth of kings and emperors, from Nero of Rome to Henry of England, —men who were impatient to give her a death blow,— she never faltered in confessing her faith. She has seen the rise and fall of many dynasties, she sees the tombs of heresy, and heretics, of false philosophies and philosophers, and as by dint of ambrosial liqueur, like a young giantess she confronts new generations, new systems, new conditions, new inventions, with a confidence whose origin it would be sagacious and profitable if the universal world would only bring itself to accept. The good such realization achieved would more than compensate for the violence thus wrought to their feelings. Herod sought her in her cradle with murderous design—"Herod, a king, stretched forth his hand, to afflict some of the Church." The life of the persecutor went down in a violent and bloody evening —"for with an angel of the Lord struck him, because he had not given the honor to God, and being eaten up by worms he gave up the ghost." (Acts xii, 23.) The revolting spectacle of a man whose very bowels fell out of him makes the name of Arius a reminder of that dread and secret power that guards the Church from error within as well as harm without—a power, O ye nations! it does not pay to antagonize. Tracked by human wolves the christian sheep and lambs have had to burrow into the earth like worms—a bloody heirloom, whose heritage has passed on to other places from Rome to Erin and Poland, to the lands of Patrick and Nepomucene whose turn has come to pay to the living God their worshipful duties, to be sealed with the tessera of spiritual vitality—to be branded as nations of Christ. But persecution has been to her as the kindly shower of April, irrigating her faith and insuring abundant harvest.—"The Word of the Lord increased and multiplied." When her children have emptied their veins, having bled to death, their very persecutors as Saul, their very executioners and the wives and children of their slayers have replenished the depleted ranks of the martyred dead. Where is the secret of this wonder of ages? There must be in the Church some principle that is not found elsewhere. Fanatics of the rustic type, under rabid tutelage and preaching— self-condemning, from its tone of envy and acidity, inasmuch as such qualities as are here displayed cannot have an origin in the meek and charitable Christ, cannot be prompted by the love of God—such fanatics, I repeat, in the wheat-fields of western America, in the hamlets of New England, in the suburbs of Edinboro, or in the shires of Old England, poisoned with bitterness toward their fellow christians, ascribe the secret power of the Church to Beelzebub. Statesmen impute it to her natural military system, to a naturally wise social system. A vast number of men impute the perpetuity of the Church to a superstitious turn, a sort of disposition to be duped. This contention is veiled somewhat by the term, eccentricity. These samples of reasoning, alas, avow insincerity and self-deception on the part of many outside the Church. It is the old story of the unfair man, who, when arguments do not serve his end, will not shrink from recourse to vilification. When the ranks of the Church are shown to be recruited out of the best brawn, highest culture and purest blood of every land, such reasoning is altogether pitiable. In what terms can we classify that disposition of vision which denies the perpetuity of the Church? It is not known to the vocabulary of reason. When the Holy Ghost descended at Pentecost wonders of speech excited comments— "what meaneth this?" says one, but others mocking said, "these men are full of new wine."
