People sometimes talk about the difficulties of having faith; but this is not where the trouble lies. The real struggle and conflict of religion is to correct the morals of men. True religion insists upon the keeping of the commandments, and that is why it is so repugnant to men. Faith is easy to the virtuous; if men wished to be moral there would be no difficulties about faith. We sometimes hear people say: "Your religion is a perfect tyranny." Yes, if you choose to call the Ten Commandments tyranny. {218} This is the only tyranny that I have ever found. I think, also, that every Catholic will testify that these Ten Commandments are what really make religion hard, and that if these could only be set aside men would never complain of its being hard. I never heard of a Catholic who was willing to keep the Ten Commandments who thought that anything else connected with his religion was hard. Here we have, then, in a nutshell, the whole secret of the opposition of men to the true religion; but, inconsistent as it may seem and really is, men, while they hate, have yet to admire what they hate. An apostate monk may set himself up as a reformer and talk about "justification by faith alone," but the world laughs at such nonsense. It trembles, though, when it hears our Lord say: "Every tree, therefore, that bringeth not forth good fruit shall be cut down and cast into the fire." "If any man loves me he will keep my commandments." This pretended reformer, Doctor Martin Luther, who called that wonderful Epistle of St. James, in which we are taught that "faith without good works is dead," "an epistle of straw," proved, however, to the world by his own life that it was this straw of being obliged to keep the commandments which broke his back, as it has broken the backs of so many others. But people do not have to leave the church to be thus broken, for we have in the bosom of the church, also, those who try to have piety without morality; but they are the hypocrites, the sham followers of Christ. They will some day, unless they speedily change their lives, hear our Lord saying to them: "I never knew you; depart from me, ye that work iniquity." Ah! may we not some of us have good reason to fear that we shall one day be judged as hypocrites? {219} The bankrupt merchant is afraid to look at his books, and trembles at the thought of attempting to calculate his liabilities; so those false Christians dare not look at the law of God to examine their lives by it. But, to their shame and grief, the day of reckoning will come. The devil may whisper to such, "Soul, take thy ease," but, thank God! there is the voice of God's church, which will not allow us to delude ourselves.