TRUE LIBERTY.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume V, Issue 215, 8 June 1877, Page 11

TRUE LIBERTY .

The plaint of the Holy Father over the altered state of Borne is not the least pathetic part of his splendid Allocution, so full, at the same time, of a lofty courage and an allembracing pity. It is the old story repeated once more. The Church has been proscribed, and in her place riot and disorder reign, and shamelessness walks abroad in the open light of day. r It has been so from the first. Hardly had the great apostasy of the sixteenth century taken place, when Europe stank with excess ; grotesque and hideous caricatures of Religion started up on all sides, and every man became his own interpreter of right and wrong, and morality suffered so that even those who had led the revolt, and, by the example of licentious lives, paved the way for such a state of things, declared the condition of the "reformed" countries to have deteriorated from what it had been before the voice of the seducer had been heard in them. And if now impiety and obscenity have invaded the streets made sacred by the presence of the Vicar of Christ, and are only prevented from reaching his ears and insulting his sight by his close seclusion in the recesses of the Vatican — a palace become a prison — it is that the movement which they name " Information," spread more widely under its later name of Revolution, has reached the foot of his throne and surges there, longing to destroy him, but as yet of insufficient daring for so enormous an attempt. Let not any one think, however, that to confound the " reformation" begun by the rabid German monk, who came foaming out" of his convent some three centuries and a half ago and trod all his solemn obligations in the mud, with the revolution that has already once culminated in the Reign of Terror, and that will again culminate, in Heaven knows what further demoniac prodigies, is an injustice. " From that first necessary assertion of Luther's," says Carlyle, "you, self-styled Papa, you are no Father in God at all ; you are— a chimera, whom I know not how to name in polite language ! -from that onwards to the shout which rose round Cvi ille Desmotjlins in the Palais-Royal, i AuxArmesV when the people had burpt up against all manner of chimeras, — I find a natural historical sequence." And again he says — but this time, iv part, falsely, — " It (the French Revolution) is properly the third and final act of Protestantism." It was not its final act ; but for this the world is now ripening. A clear warning of its rapid approach has been souuded. in the trumpet notes of the Pope's Allocution, which our columns, according to the desire of his Holiness, have published in tbe extreme southeast, and than which, in whatever point of view it be taken, no more wonderful utterance has ever appeared in the pages of a newspaper. Well might the Italian Government hesitate iv permitting its publication, aud well might they shrink from the temerity of its repression. But it is not our part to criticise that which is above criticism; we have to do with the state of Eonie enslaved to the endurance of licentiousness, and where, by a sad but necessary companionship, the conventicles of false worship stand side by side with the exhibition of ribaldry and uucleanness. And this they call liberty— the right to hide the truth, and substitute iv its place all that can vitiate the mind. What slavery is so debasing ? We desire to think well of all °be world, but when we consider the applause that has accompanied the Piedmontese occupation of Koine, and when we hear men aud women of ' good repute sustaining the cause of the usurper, and read iv journals and publications of high standing panegyrics on j " United Italy," our utmost charity can bufc force us to hope that these people and writers are, in truth, so bliuded by prejudice, that ifc is impossible for them to see things as 1 they actually are ; and we are more than ever deteriniued j to insist upon Catholic education, and the necessity of 1 Catholic reading for Catholics, so that they may be presented with the truth, and given the means of choosing the good aud rejecting the evil, in which true liberty consists ; for, as for those who desire anythiug else thau this, License they mean when they cry Liberty.