The Intermountain Catholic. (Salt Lake City [Utah] ;) 1899-1920, 1902-07-12
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would do them any good. 1t is al
ways right to emancipate them from
the thraldom in which the church for
so many ages has held them, to free
them from the priestly domination
which degrades them, and to use such
means as are necessary to this end. If
deception is necessary, then we have
right to practice deception. If we
deceive the people it is for their good,
to emancipate them from those who
have so long abused them"
After all, Dick, you hardly dare
accept your own doctrine. If you had
full confidence in it, Why labor to
prove that your cause is not repug-
nant to moral principle? You aim to
emancipate the flesh, nay, to elevate
the flesh to the rank of the supreme
divinity. You propose as your God,
God in the flesh, not in the Christian
sense of the incarnation, as you would
fain make fools believe, but in the
pantheistic sense that the flesh is God
and lust is his worship. Why. then,
should you apologize for following the
flesh and doing its works? Now. the
works of flesh are fornication, unclean-
ness, immodesty, luxury, idolatry,
Witchcraft, enmities, contentious, emu
lations wrath, quarrels, dissensions.
sectS, envy, murders, drunkenness, rev
elingS and such like These, though
mortal sins in view of the Christian,
must be heroic virtues in yours. On
your principle there can be nothing
in lying, cheating, robbing, stealing,
numbering, assassination to be
ashamed of, pologize for, or to de-
fend, as yom 'uropean friends very
clearly show by the means they adopt
for carrying out their plans of political
and social regeneration. Do they not
make a free use of the stiletto, and
have they not instituted the worship
of the dagger? You reverse the whole
moral code of mankind and call by the
name of truth what has hitherto gone
by the name of falsehood; holy act
what has generally been punished as
a crime; virtue what old-fashiOned
morality has stigmatiZed as vice. In
all this you are consistent with your
selves and loyal to your principles.
Your dictrine consecrates vice and
divinizes crime. If you are right in
principle your conduct needs no de-
Tense. But [ suspect, Dick, that your
good sense and better feelings disavow
your doctrine, and refuse to worship
the idol you set up"
You wrong us, uncle. We do not
advocate even what you call vice, and
We abhor what you name, after Paul,
as the works of the flesh We love
and venerate virtue, and our sole OBJ
ject is to render all men sincere, hon
est, virtuous and to enable them to live
| together in a holy society, in a loving
brotherhood, in peace and friendship,
each loving his brother as himself. We
would realize on earth the sweet vision
of paradise"
'All very fine-in words, my poor boy;
but the mischief is that you miscall
words, and are the dupes of your own
cunning. You are really seeking to an
ticipate the flesh. One of the ablest of
the fathers of young Germany was
Heinrich Heine, who praises Luther's
reformation because it was, as he says,
a noble assertion of sensuality, of the
rights of the flesh against the spirit
uaiity of the church; and he contends
that we ought to institute festivals in
honor of the flesh. to atone to it for
the wrongs and indignities for so many
ages heaped upon it by Catholicity
You cannot emancipate the flesh with
out asserting your right to do the deeds
of the flesh. These deeds are never
good; they are always bad, and de-
structive of both soul and body The
experience of all ages proves that the
works of the flesh are what the apostle
asserts, and that virtue, that love. that
friendship, that peace, domestic or
social, private or public, is possible
only on condition that the flesh is re-
sisted and kept in subsection to the law
of the spirit appetite and passion are
subjected to reason, and reason to the
law of God"
I Thine was, my dear Dick, when
thought and reasoned as you do.
imagined that the whole world had
gone wrong from the beginning, and
because men had set out with the per-
suasion that the inclina lions of the
flesh are to evil, and that to be vir-
tuous we must resist them, and prac-
tice self-denial. l placed the evil
saw and deplored in restraint, in the
restraint which moralists teach us to
impose upon ourselves, and to which
priests and magistrates always labor
to subject us. Only give us liberty,
only leave us free to follow our in
stincts, the natural sentiments of our
own hearts, the promptings of our own
natural affections, and vice and crime
will disappear. wrongs and outrages
will cease to be committed, and the
whole world will live in peace and
love. But, alasi l found by painful
experience that the heart is deceitful
above all things, and exceedingly cor
rupt, that human nature, whose praises
1 had chanted is rotten. and that the
sweetest and apparently the purest
sentiments easily become the most de-
grading and disgusting lusts, and that
to give loose reins to the flesh is only
to be precipitated into unbridled licen-
tiousness. I found peace, and recov-
cred self-respect only in proportion as
by the grace of God I was enabled to
practice self-denial, and to return and
conform to the very doctrine which I
had regarded as the origin and source
of all the evils flesh is heir to. Be
assured, my dear nephew, that the evil
originates not in the restraints imposed
by religion and morality but in break
ing through them and following
wherever our natural inclinations
lead"
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