To-day, as in 1790, France is the field on which another great battle is to be fought between Christianity and paganism, and its results will be far-reaching. The French atheocracy has “said unto God, Depart from us; for we desire not the knowledge of Thy ways” (Job XXI. 14). Churches, here and there, have already been profaned by Masonic revelry, the cross has been demolished on every highway, and removed from every school and hospital. The State, disposing of all the power and all the riches of the nation, is at the command of a secret society that is the sworn and avowed enemy of religion. If the Church again come forth victorious from the struggle, stronger and purer through poverty and persecution, “if the Christian Hercules uplift Antæus, son of the earth, into the air and stifle him there, then--_patuit Deus_.” LIBERTY AND CHRISTIANITY Liberty is, pre-eminently and indisputably, a product of Christianity and must diminish with every diminution of the faith. “Other influences,” writes Lecky, “could produce the manumission of many slaves, but Christianity alone could effect that profound change of character that rendered the abolition of slavery possible, and there are,” he says, “few subjects more interesting than the history of that great transition” (_History of Rationalism_, II, 258). There is, indeed, no grander spectacle than that of the Catholic Church proclaiming, in ages of barbarism, a divine “Thou shalt not” to masters, whose power over their slaves was unlimited by any law, and even assuming jurisdiction over them in virtue of a moral law, above all human laws.