TWENTY-SECOND LETTER.

Sentence of the judgment between us and the first Christians. First obligation, to make the Sign of the Cross boldly, to make it often, and to make it well. Reasons for making it boldly. Disgrace and danger of not making it. State of the physical and moral health of the world at the present day December 19th.

MY DEAR FREDERIC:

When, in civil affairs, a judgment without appeal is rendered, what remains to the parties? Only one thing. Under pain of revolt and all the consequences of revolt, it must be executed. It is the same in doctrinal questions. When an infallible authority has pronounced upon a point in litigation, only one course remains. Under pain of a revolt much more grievous, and all the consequences of that revolt, the decree of the supreme tribunal must be taken as the rule of conduct.

A trial was instituted between us and the early Christians. It was to be decided who were right or wrong; the first Christians who made the Sign of the Cross, made it very often, and made it well; or modern Christians who do not make the Sign of the Cross, make it seldom, or make it badly. The cause has been carefully examined, the debates published, the pleadings heard. The élite of humanity, constituted as a sovereign tribunal, and having for assistant judges faith, reason, experience, and nations, even those which were pagan, have decided in favor of the Christians of the primitive Church. What remains for us to do? We must renew the glorious chain of our ancient traditions, so unhappily broken, and make the Sign of the Cross boldly, make it often, make it well.

Make the Sign of the Cross boldly and openly. And why should we not do so? Why be ashamed of making it? Remark well, my dear friend, that to make, or not make, the Sign of the Cross is not an optional thing. He who makes it honors himself; he who does not make it dishonors himself.

In making the Sign of the Cross, we have behind us, around us, with us, all the great men and grand ages of the East and West; all the immortal Catholic nation, the élite of humanity. In not making it, we have behind us, around us, with us, the shallow-minded heretics, unbelievers, and ignoramuses,: the little and great beasts. In making the Sign of the Cross we cover both ourselves and creatures with an invincible armor. In not making it, we disarm ourselves, and expose both ourselves and creatures to the gravest perils.

Both man and the world necessarily live under the influence of the Spirit of good or the Spirit of evil. Master of man and of creatures, the Spirit of evil makes them feel his malignant influence; body and soul, mind and matter are vitiated by it. This fundamental truth has been believed by all mankind.

Again, for more than eighteen centuries the chiefs of the eternal combat have not ceased to cry out to us with one voice, to cover both ourselves and creatures with the Sign of the Cross, a buckler, impenetrable to the burning darts of the enemy: Scutum in quo ignitæ diaboli extinguuntur sagittæ. And we, soldiers unfaithful to our instructions, voluntarily cast aside our armor? With naked breast, we stupidly remain exposed to the deadly blows of the armed enemy! And all this, that we may not displease others; and such others! But they say: A The present world does not make the Sign of the Cross, and it is none the worse for it.@ Is this quite certain? What is today the general health of man and of nature? Do you not hear it repeated every day in Germany as in France, as everywhere, A There is no more health@ ? This saying, now become popular, is it no more than a saying? Even optimists tell it to you. Do you believe then that the divine laws made for man, mind and matter, have not in this life a double sanction, one moral, the other physical? Do you believe that the profanation, becoming more and more general, of the days consecrated to the repose of man and creatures, the contempt of the laws of fast and abstinence, the abandonment of the bread of life, can compromise only the salvation of the soul?

Do you believe that the over-anxiety of affairs, the agitations of politics, the fever of enjoyments, distinctive character of a world which has undertaken to make Heaven descend upon Earth; the effeminacy of manners, the abnormal habit of turning night into day and day into night, the searches of sensuality in food, the frightful consumption of alcoholic liquors, our five hundred thousand coffee-houses and taverns, are without influence on the public health? Whence, then, proceeds the diminution of strength in modern generations? Would it be easy to find, today, many young men capable of handling the arms of our ancestors of the middle ages, or even of carrying their armor?

Those numerous reforms, made by the councils of revision on account of etiolation or defects of conformation; the inability of so many persons, even religious, to observe the law of fasting, although so much mitigated, have they no signification? What says that augmentation, already considerable yet ever increasing, of apothecaries, physicians, health officers and healing mediums, whose antechambers will soon be as much frequented as the offices of the most eminent medical men?

Finally, those cases of ѕυιcιdє and insanity, which in our time have swelled to such unprecedented numbers, and are still increasing, are they very reassuring symptoms of the public health? Even allowing to them only a limited value, do these facts, and many others, demonstrate that the man of to-day is no worse than the man of former times? And the health of nature, over which is no longer made the liberating sign, is it still improving? What means the disease of the potatoes, the disease of the vine, the diseases of trees, vegetables, plants, and herbs, even of pasture? All these unhealthy plants, which number more than one hundred, attacked simultaneously by serious, unknown and obstinate diseases, do they prove the perfect health of creatures? This phenomenon, all the more inauspicious, as it is without analogy in history, does it not rather seem to give to actual nature the appearance of a great hospital, in which, like the human species, all suffers, all languishes, all dies??

It cannot then be denied; considered in man, and in creatures immediately subjected to man, the world of our day is diseased, more diseased than formerly. But what is the malady? It is the enfeebling of life. The Word Creator is life and all life. To approach Him is to augment life, to retire from Him is to diminish it. In the judgment of the Church and all Christian ages, the exterior act, the feature of union the most universal and most ordinary which places man and creatures in contact with the Life, is the Sign of the Cross. Now, you laugh at it, you do not make it; you do not wish to make it. As far as you are concerned, you replace it, and also the prayers and pilgrimages of former times, by sea-bathing, by waters hot, cold, tepid, sulfureous, or ferruginous, from Vichy, Switzerland, Germany, or the Pyrenees. And in creatures, by artificial manure, echenillage, draining, and sulfur. All very well; only it is necessary to do the one, and not omit the other: Hæc oportuit facere et illa non omittere.

Thus, the people of the world of our day, despisers of wisdom both human and divine, believe that they can violate with impunity a law religiously observed from the foundation of Christianity, and respected even by the pagans, who had it as a formula in the celebrated maxim: It is necessary to pray in order to enjoy physical and moral health, Orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano. Let us not complain; we have what we have, and it is our due. Even were the physical health of man and nature, bereft of the Sign of the Cross, to be as flourishing as they pretend, there would still remain the moral health, far more important than the first. Now, what is the sanitary state of souls in the world of our day? The answer would lead me too far. I only remind you that the moral man, as well as the physical, has the inevitable alternative either to live under the salutary influence of the good Spirit, or the malevolent influence of the evil Spirit. The Sign of the Cross places us under the first; the absence of this sign abandons us to the second. Such is, again, the teaching of the Church, confirmed by the practice of Christian ages.

This experience of eighteen hundred years is nothing to you. You no longer want the sacred sign; you no longer have any faith in it; you no longer make it on your forehead, your lips, your heart, or your food. Ah, well! the Demon will mark his own. On all those foreheads, on all those lips, on all those hearts, on all that food, shall be seen, without any necessity for a microscope, the Sign of the Beast.

What is the Sign of the Beast on the forehead? It is pride, insubordination, anger, contempt, effrontery, agitation of the features; inaptitude for spiritual sciences, disgust for moral studies; pleasures tarnished by the vice of impurity or consumed by wine; something heavy in the countenance; something low, dull and bestial; the cynicism of eyes full of adultery, full of a sin that never ends, continually alluring unstable souls..

What is it on the lips? Laughter, either immodest or immoderate, foolishly impious or cruelly mocking; talkativeness without rule, without importance, without aim, obscene words, words of deceit, irreligion, blasphemy, hatred, detraction and jealousy; too full of concupiscences which rise like a foam, infectious as the exhalations of a sepulcher, deadly as the venom of a viper..

What is it in the heart? Bad thoughts, wicked desires, fornications, impurities, treasons, the shameful petty acts of egotism; thefts, poisonings, murders,, the reign of courtesans, the apotheosis of actresses.

What is it over eatables? Their pernicious influence. Not having been delivered by the saving sign, they serve, as even the pagans themselves acknowledged, as vehicles to the Demon. Placed by manducation in intimate contact with the inferior part of the soul, they excite its appetites, flatter its base instincts, and stir up its passions.

Hence, what we now see; nicety in choice, sensuality in eating and drinking, despotism of the flesh, disgust for labor, powerlessness to resist temptation, the abasement and sometimes brutalizing of the intellect, softness of morals, Sybaritism of habits, the adoration of the god of the belly, comp1eted today more than ever by contempt of self, by the stifling of conscience and the moral sense, by ѕυιcιdє and infanticide.. Look around you, my dear friend; seek for countenances, lips, hearts and tables, where are preserved the health, dignity, and sobriety of the man and the Christian; lives pure and mortified; lives strong against temptations, lives devoted to virtue and charity, lives which may, without shame, be revealed to friends or enemies; you will find them only under the protection of the Sign of the Cross.

What I have told you today, accept as a fact of experience. Tomorrow I will give you the reasons and proofs of it.