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The Alternative to Heroism is Merciless

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Freedom is the power to do good

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Heroism

The splendor of heroism is Charity. And Pope Benedict XIV adds that “the excellence of these virtues is established, even though the virtuous acts are numerous and heroic, only if, in addition, they have been accomplished with promptness, joy and in a kind of delight which is the very character of holiness.

See a perfect example –St-Joan of Arc  here

The seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, King of the City of good, are wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of God.

Qoting St. Thomas, fortitude denotes a firmness of mind in doing good and in avoiding evil, particularly when it is difficult or dangerous to do so, and the confidence to overcome all obstacles, even deadly ones, by virtue of the assurance of everlasting life

Mgr. Gaume:

The more or less determining influence of the angelic world or the satanic world accounts for the alternations of light and darkness, crimes and virtues, liberties and servitudes, glory and shame, prosperity and catastrophes, which alternately mark the annals of humanity. Such is the true philosophy of history. The irrefutable proof of this fact, revealing the rise and fall of empires, is the very history of the City of good and the City of evil.

The only thing that constitutes, in the moral as in the physical, all the peril of the situation, is the rupture of the balance. It takes place, in the spiritual order, whenever man gives precedence over himself to the Spirit of evil, rather than to the Spirit of good: a thing which depends on him, only on him. In order to turn him away from this act of guilty folly, which the princes of the City of Evil incessantly solicit from him, the Holy Spirit not only provides him with all the means of resistance, but also shows him the consequences of his felony.

Slavery, shame and punishment await the man who leaves the City of Good

Slavery, shame and punishment

Threefold rampart with which the King of the City of good surrounds his happy City, in order to preserve His subjects from the temptation to leave it.

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Slavery

Freedom is the daughter of truth. Governed by the Spirit of Truth, only the City of Good is the home of freedom. Let the defectors learn to blush as they desert it and enter the city of evil. No, they do not glorify freedom, they dishonour it. They do not march to the conquest of independence, they become slaves.

Shame

It is a shame to be free and to become a willing slave. To become a beast is a greater shame. This inevitable shame is the second bulwark, with which the Holy Spirit surrounds the City of Good to prevent man from leaving it.

The punishment

In order to protect the peace and life of his subjects against the attacks of the enemy, the Holy Spirit surrounds his City with a third bulwark more solid than the first. If a man, whoever he may be, dares to say to the King of the City of Good: I no longer wish to obey you, non serviam , he immediately goes from being free to being a slave and to becoming an abomination. Drawn into all intellectual and moral degradations, he begins in this life the hell that awaits him in the next.

Freedom

Freedom does not consist in doing evil, but in avoiding it. The more one avoids it, the freer one is. St. Thomas says:

“We must reason about free will as about the understanding. The free will chooses among the acts that relate to the end; the understanding draws conclusions from the principles. Now everyone knows that it is part of the powers of the understanding to draw conclusions, but always logically deduced from the principles given. That if, in drawing a conclusion, it forgets, disregards the principles, it is an imperfection, a weakness on its part.

“Likewise, that free will has the faculty of making different choices, but always in relation to the proposed end, in this consists its perfection. Does it ever make a choice contrary to man’s final end? This is not a perfection, but a weakness and a defect. From this it follows that the freedom or perfection of free will is greater in angels, who cannot sin, than in us, who can sin. (S. Th., I p., q. LXII, art. 8, ad 3.)

This, then, is the doctrine of St. Thomas: freedom is the power to do good, as the understanding is the faculty of knowing what is true. The possibility of doing evil is no more of the essence of freedom than the possibility of being mistaken is of the essence of the understanding; nor is the possibility of being ill of the essence of health.

Impeccability is the perfection of freedom, just as infallibility is the perfection of understanding, just as the absence of disease is the perfection of health.

To be sinful, then, is a defect in freedom, just as being fallible is a defect in understanding, just as being sick is a defect in health. It follows that the more a man sins, the more he shows the weakness of his free will; just as the more he errs, the more he shows the weakness of his reason; just as the more he is ill, the more he shows ill health.

The more he sins and misguides, the more he degrades himself and makes himself contemptible; for the closer he comes to the child, who has neither freedom nor understanding yet, or to the fool, who has none, or to the beast, who will never have it.

This fundamental truth is the first armour with which the Holy Spirit clothes us, the first reason given to man to enclose himself eternally within the limits of the City of Good.

Many do not understand this. Seduced by the princes of the City of Evil, many come to look upon the day when they emancipate themselves from the kingship of the Holy Spirit as the day of their freedom. Poor blind people! Let them at least once see the truth in the face: nothing is easier for them. It is engraved in the slavery of all the faculties of the soul, in the degradation of all the members of the body, in all the soiled pages of the so-called independent life.

Mgr. Gaume continues:

Young men or old men, rich or poor, literate or illiterate, who, having deserted the City of Good, betrayed the vows of your baptism, blushed at the faith of your childhood and the practices of your forefathers, believe yourselves to be free. It is true, you walk with your head held high, your eyes confident. Your lips grimace with laughter and your forehead is hidden under a mask of mirth. By the metallic sound of your voice, the sharp tone of your words, you could be taken for the regents of humanity. Yet you are only slaves, unhappy slaves, slaves of the worst kind.
Instead of one Master, most high and holy, whom you refuse to serve as He wills, you serve as many masters as there are despicable inclinations in you; and, outside of you, as many creatures who can procure for you or compete with you the distinguished honour of satisfying them. You serve them, not as you wish, but as they wish. Merciless masters, they drag you with a rope around your neck, or chase you with a whip in the hand, in all the dark ways of evil.

Drawn away from your native land, you have forgotten the way to our temples; but you know by heart the way to theatres and other places. The chalice of God the Redeemer, where, with life, you drink come, honour, freedom, the appeasement of the soul and the senses, is to your disgust; and you drink at length from the chalice of the devil, where, with death, you drink crime, shame, slavery, the fever of the soul and the furies of despair. Too great in your eyes to wear the protective insignia of the Queen of Heaven, you wear, set in gold, the hair of a courtesan. Men and not angels, you must love the flesh. You did not want to love the immaculate flesh of the God-man, you will love the foul flesh of a foul creature.

In vain you would sometimes breathe the air of freedom. You are fledglings stuck in pertid calls, you cannot take flight. At each attempt, a pitiless voice, the voice of your male or female masters, is heard: No resistance, you are mine. By giving me your will, you have given me everything. Give me your money, give me your nights; give me the roses of your cheeks; give me the peace of your soul; give me the health of your body; give me the joy of your mother; give me the hopes of your father; give me the honour of your name and you give them! Are you free?

Silence! slaves; do not profane, by pronouncing it, a word that accuses you. Slaves in your intelligence, tyrannised by doubt and error; slaves in your heart, tyrannised by bestial appetites, what is your life but a soiled cloth? And the story of your life, if not the story of a slave? Wretches! who cannot descend into your conscience without hearing a voice accusing you, nor look at your hands without seeing the mark of irons, or your feet without finding the ball and chain of a convict! Sons of kings, turned pigs’ keepers: that is what you are. It behoves you to be proud.

..speaking of wretches

There is hope

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Slavery of the soul: this is what all men who set foot outside the precincts of the City of Good meet. This is what they will encounter eternally; for it is written: “Where the Spirit of the Lord dwells, there and only there is freedom.

Now, in the moral world as in the material world, it is a law that the superior part attracts the inferior: Major pars trahit ad se minorem. To the servitude of the soul is necessarily added the slavery of the body: consequently, social slavery. It cannot be repeated too often, especially today: civil and political liberty is not to be found at the point of a dagger, nor at the mouth of a cannon, nor under the pavement of a barricade. It is the offspring, not of a charter, nor of a law, nor of any form of government, but of moral freedom. Whatever it says and whatever it does, every corrupt people is a born slave. Moral freedom presupposes faith; faith is truth; truth resides only in the City of Good.

Do you want to see the proof? Take a world map. Besides the despotism of error, what does it show you? Everywhere the despotism of gold, the despotism of the flesh, the despotism of matter; and above all these despotisms, the despotism of the sword.

What then is a society that shakes off the yoke of the Holy Spirit? The pagans themselves, as unsuspecting witnesses, say, “It is cattle on a fairground, always ready to be sold to the highest bidder. Modern history does not deny this any more than ancient history does.

How are human cattle treated? As they deserve. Satan, to whom he surrenders himself by abandoning the Holy Spirit, sends him masters of his own hand. Nero, Heliogabalus, Diocletian and so many others, take it upon themselves to make the emancipated man taste the sweetness of the freedom enjoyed by the City of Evil. By a return of merciful justice, God Himself allows the elevation of these crowned tigers.

In this connection, history records a sobering fact. As people always get the government they deserve, a cruel beast called Phocas sat on the imperial throne of Rome. By his orders, blood flowed freely: and the beast drank it with delight. Revolted as well as distressed by this spectacle, a recluse from the Thebaid addressed God and said to him: “Why, my God, have you made him emperor? And God answers him: Because I have not found a worse one.

Thus, to preserve freedom with all its glories: this is the first advantage for humanity of its stay in the City of Good; to lose this treasure and find slavery: this is its first punishment if it dares to cross its walls.

Shame

To become deified or stupid: these are the two opposite poles of the moral world. God or beast: this is the supreme alternative in which man finds himself placed here below. The reason for this is that he is obliged to live under the rule of the King of the City of Good, or under the rule of the King of the City of Evil. Now, both of these kings make their subjects in their own image: God, the Holy Spirit makes them gods; beast, Satan makes them beasts.

The Holy Spirit kept His word. See what has become of the angels who are docile to His voice. Resplendent with glory, inundated with delight, endowed with all the divine attributes, intelligence, strength, goodness, they approach God, as much as the finite can approach the infinite. See Christian humanity in its true representatives, the apostles, the martyrs, the virgins, those legions of saints, male and female, divinely birthed for eighteen (21 today) centuries and beyond, on all points of the globe. How high they raise Christian humanity above pagan humanity, above humanity that ceases to be Christian!

What will it be if you contemplate this deification in its complement, I mean in the splendours of eternity? It is here that the word, expiring on the lips, can only make heard the expression of its impression: “No, man’s eye has not seen, his ear has not heard, his heart, however vast it may be, cannot understand what God has in store for those who have become, through love, His sons and His heirs. \Cor., Il, 9).

The prince of the city of evil, on the other hand, works hard at the opposite. Let him draw a man to himself, he takes him into his clutches, blinds his mind, corrupts his heart, intoxicates him with his poisons and turns him into a beast. Look instead: except for one thing, the beast does everything that man does. The beast eats, drinks, sleeps, digests, walks, runs, flies, swims, builds, calculates, speaks, writes, sings, travels, plans, hoards, exercises all the arts of peace and war. In all this she is equal to man, sometimes superior. But there is one thing that the beast does not do, cannot do, will never do, and which puts it at an infinite distance below man: prayer. Man prays; the beast does not pray. Man worships, the beast does not. This means, in other words, that between man and beast only one thing makes the difference, religion.

Now, the first effect of satanic action on man is to make him blush at religion; and he does blush! Religion has two great manifestations: prayer and love. Prayer is so much the distinguishing mark of man that the pagans have defined him as a praying animal. Our Lord Himself defines a Christian as a man who always prays. Thus, as soon as man stops praying, he turns into a beast. If he does not pray at all, he is completely stupid. It is not we who say this, but the Truth itself, expressed through the mouth of Saint Paul.

Having fallen from the heights of faith, he has no other intelligence than that of matter and material life. Look for the final goal of his speculations, of his studies, of his discoveries, of his politics, of all this feverish movement which drives him and consumes him: what will you find? The body and its appetites.

Light, progress, civilisation: what is the meaning of all these pompous words? Translated into vulgar prose, they mean science of the stew, philosophy of the stew, love of the stew, guarantee and glorification of the stew. In different words, it is the invariable programme and the eternal refrain of all men and peoples, dumbed down by the infernal beast.

Do not give me as proof of the intelligence of the animal man the skilful way in which he manipulates matter. The swallow, the silkworm, the bee, which do not have intelligence, handle it more skilfully than he does. We repeat, intelligence consists in reading the idea in the fact, in seeing the cause in the phenomenon: not, notice it well, this immediate cause which shines through the fact; but the true cause, the first cause and the final goal. Now all this is known only in the City of Good.

To him who dwells in the City of the Prince of Darkness speak of the world of causes, of the world of God and of angels, the true domain of the intellect: all these realities are to him abstractions or chimeras; he is stupid.

What will it be if you point out to him the permanent, universal, inevitable and decisive intervention of the lower world? His lips will wince with contempt; he is stupid.

Come down from these heights; tell him that he has an immortal soul, created in the image of God, redeemed by the blood of a God, destined for eternal happiness or misfortune; add that the sole purpose of man is to save it, and that to occupy oneself with all the others, except this one, is to chase flies and weave cobwebs: he will either yawn or donate; he is stupid.

Try to unfold before his eyes the marvels of grace, all those masterpieces of power, wisdom and love which have exhausted the admiration of the greatest geniuses, and you speak a language of which he does not understand a word; he is stupid.
Sermons, books of piety or Christian philosophy, religious conversations, solemn feasts which, with the most august mysteries, recall to the mind and heart the greatest blessings of heaven, as well as the greatest events of the earth, in a word, everything that has to do with the supernatural world, bores him; he understands nothing, he feels nothing, he is stupid.

But speak to him of money, trade, steam, electricity, machines, coal, cotton, beets, cattle, meadows, fertilisers, production and consumption, and he becomes all eyes and ears. You attack the vital question of his philosophy, the question of the stew. He knows no other. “Forgetting his dignity,” says the prophet, “man held himself out as a beast without understanding, and became like it.”

Punishment

This, as we have just seen, is the fate inevitably reserved for the individual. Does the revolt against the Holy Spirit become so contagious that a people as a whole, or the human race itself, becomes one great insurgent? then crime, overflowing on all sides, attracts exceptional punishments.

Every law carries with it a penalty. Every law which has man as its subject, composed of a body and a soul, is a double-edged sword, which strikes the prevaricator in both parts of his being. Take any divine or ecclesiastical law you please, and if you look hard enough, you can be sure of finding, without prejudice to the moral sanction, a temporal reward or punishment for observing or violating this law.

imageedit 734 87950333201 1To omit particular plagues, let mankind reread its historical and prophetic annals. Three great disasters are recorded there. The first is the flood, or the ruin of the antediluvian world. What was the cause of this cataclysm, in which the whole human race, except for eight persons, perished? He whose hand broke the dikes of the sea and opened the cataracts of heaven reveals it to us in two words. My Spirit,” says the Lord, “shall not abide in man for long, for man has become flesh.

Image: A reliquary displaying a piece of wood at the museum of Etchmiadzin Cathedral in Armenia, said to be from Noah’s Ark. By tradition saint Jacob of Nisibis received the wood from an angel during his search for the Ark.

This dreadful sentence is translated as follows: “In spite of all My ways, man has shaken off the yoke of My Spirit, the spirit of light and virtue; he has given himself over to the influence of the spirit of darkness and wickedness. The supernatural world, his soul, myself, are nothing to him. From his body he has made his God, he has become flesh. A guilty and degraded creature, he is unworthy of the blessing of life: he will perish. And the flood of crime was followed by the flood of water which swept them all away.

A second catastrophe, no less striking than the first, is the ruin of the pagan world. Forgetting the terrible lesson he had received, the new man had withdrawn from the action of the Holy Spirit. Surrendered body and soul to the evil Spirit, he had come to recognise him almost universally as his king and his god. Under a thousand different names, he worshipped him in millions of temples, from one end of the world to the other (Omnes dii gentium daemonia. Ps. XCV, 5.): so many adorations, so many sacrileges, cruelties and infamies. As before the flood of water, man had become flesh again; with the breath of the barbarians, the pagan world disappeared under a flood of blood.

There is a third catastrophe, more terrible and no less certain than the preceding ones, and that is the ruin of the apostate world of Christianity, by the deluge of fire which will put an end to the existence of the human race on the globe. The world of the last days, trampling underfoot the merits of Calvary and the blessings of the Upper Room, will constitute itself in full revolt against the Spirit of good. More than ever a slave to the Spirit of evil, it will indulge in every kind of iniquity with unknown cynicism. Such will be the number of defectors, that the City of good will be almost deserted, while the City of evil will assume colossal proportions. A third time man will have become flesh. The Spirit of the Lord will withdraw, never to return: and a flood of fire will set the earth on fire, a thousand times more guilty, for it will be a thousand times more ungrateful, than the land of the pagans and the giants.

Slavery, shame, punishment: such is the triple rampart that man must cross in order to leave the City of Good. To these external means, if we add the help and benefits of all kinds lavished on the inhabitants of this happy City, are we not entitled to conclude that no one will want to leave it? Does experience confirm this reasoning? This is what history will tell us.

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