Beacon Lights of History, Volume 06: Renaissance and ReformationLord, John
History
Beacon Lights of History, Volume 06: Renaissance and Reformation
Lord, John
History
The influence of such a man cannot pass away, and has not passed away,
for it cannot be doubted that his views have been embraced by
enlightened Catholics from his day to ours,--by such men as Pascal,
Fénelon, and Lacordaire, and thousands like them, who prefer ritualism
and auricular confession, and penance, monasticism, and an
ecclesiastical monarch, and all the machinery of a complicated
hierarchy, with all the evils growing out of papal domination, to
rationalism, sectarian dissensions, irreverence, license, want of unity,
want of government, and even dispensation from the marriage vow. Which
is worse, the physical arm of the beast, or the maniac soul of a lying
prophet? Which is worse, the superstition and narrowness which excludes
the Bible from schools, or that unbounded toleration which smiles on
those audacious infidels who cloak their cruel attacks on the faith of
Christians with the name of a progressive civilization?--and so far
advanced that one of these new lights, ignorant, perhaps, of everything
except of the fossils and shells and bugs and gases of the hole he has
bored in, assumes to know more of the mysteries of creation and the laws
of the universe than Moses and David and Paul, and all the Bacons and
Newtons that ever lived? Names are nothing; it is the spirit, the
_animus_, which is everything. It is the soul which permeates a system,
that I look at. It is the Devil from which I would flee, whatever be his
name, and though he assume the form of an angel of light, or cunningly
try to persuade me, and ingeniously argue, that there is no God. True
and good Catholics and true and good Protestants have ever been united
in one thing,--_in this belief_, that there is a God who made the heaven
and the earth, and that there is a Christ who made atonement for the
sins of the world. It is good morals, faith, and love to which both
Catholics and Protestants are exhorted by the Apostles. When either
Catholics or Protestants accept the one faith and the one Lord which
Christianity alone reveals, then they equally belong to the grand army
of spiritual warriors under the banner of the Cross, though they may
march under different generals and in different divisions; and they will
receive the same consolations in this world, and the same rewards in the
world to come.
AUTHORITIES.
Villari's Life of Savonarola; Biographie Universelle; Ranke's History of
the Popes. There is much in "Romola," by George Eliot. Life of
Savonarola, by the Prince of Mirandola.
MICHAEL ANGELO.
* * * * *
A.D. 1475-1564.
THE REVIVAL OF ART.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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