p. 136A Last Danger—conclusion

I Must refer here to a serious danger which threatens our homes, a danger indirect indeed, yet none the less sure and imminent. Secret Societies, the danger to which I refer, are undermining religion, morality, and constituted government throughout Europe, if not throughout the civilized world. They are working under the surface of every-day life. They hate the light, because it is fatal to their existence. They stab men in the dark and from behind, because they are the offsprings of cowardice. They profess to hate tyranny, yet they are themselves an example of the grossest tyranny of which the world has experience. They tear the husband from his wife and children, or the son from his widowed mother whose support he had been, and they bid him, under penalty of death, commit a crime of blood that not only cries to heaven for vengeance, but generally brings down on its perpetrator the extreme penalty of civil justice. I do not understand how a brave man can consent at the bidding of one of those societies, and even at the peril of his life, to commit the dastardly, cold-blooded murders which we have seen committed or attempted in our day. True bravery would shrink from taking a marked victim unawares, or striking him down ruthlessly, when least able to defend himself.

But secret societies strike down not public men alone, in carrying out their plans of anarchy and destruction. Helpless women, innocent children, servants doing their masters’ work, charitable persons on errands of mercy to homes of sorrow, or suffering, or death—all these may at any moment become victims to the enemy in our midst—to the secret societies that pose, notwithstanding, as the apostles of a new and better gospel, than our Lord Jesus Christ has left us. But their gospel stands convicted before the world as the gospel of meanness and cowardice, as well as of injustice and inhumanity.

Most of those whom they inveigle into their meshes can never have given a thought to the nature or consequences of the step they take, or they would never cast in their lot with men who, for all they know, may be swindlers and ruffians of the lowest kind. What is easier than that two or three men, clerks, workmen, journalists, may club together for private ends of their own, and form themselves into a secret society for the pretended redress of political or social grievances. They may enlist members, collect subscriptions, hold private meetings. They may bind their dupes to the blindest and most absolute obedience, under oaths that make the blood curdle with horror. Yet the man who joins them is deprived of communion with his Church, and, until he renounces his connexion with them, of all hope of salvation. Moreover, he must be ready, at a moment’s notice, to break every tie that binds him to his home and family, and to go and crouch behind some hedgerow, or to lie in wait in some dark passage, until his doomed, unsuspecting, defenceless victim passes by. That victim may be in mortal sin; yet his heart has no time to turn to God, until the dagger or bullet is through it. A young wife, a helpless family, aged parents—any of these, or all of them, may, by his murder, be thrown into deepest sorrow, that only death will end; but the assassin of the secret society must do his allotted work, even though the soul of his victim perish eternally, and wife and children and parents may never know happiness again.

And yet, if the principles of secret societies become generally prevalent, and be carried to their natural issues, each member of them will himself be exposed to the same death that he is prepared to inflict on others. He may, for example, have some private enemy who will denounce him to the secret council of his society, charging him with betrayal of “the cause,” and demanding for him the traitor’s usual punishment. He will be allowed no opportunity of clearing his character: he will not even be told of the accusation against him: he will walk unsuspectingly to the members’ trysting place, and shake hands and chat and make merry with the very man who is under orders to despatch him, before he returns home to his wife and children.

And how is that unhappy dupe prepared to die? He is under the ban of his Church; he has been living consciously for years in the state of grievous sin; he has no priest near him by whom he might be reconciled to heaven, even though he had time and the will for such reconciliation; he receives none of the last rites of the Catholic Church—he dies, in fact, so unprepared for his judgment and for eternity, that I can see no likelihood of his salvation.

The determined opposition of the Church to secret societies has brought much trouble on her from different quarters, but particularly from her own children. She has, thank God, saved thousands of them from temporal and eternal ruin, by her condemnation of all conspiracies, either against herself or against any established civil authority. But many of her children, too, have unfortunately disregarded her warnings and prohibitions, and have preferred to listen to irresponsible agitators, and to give up their chance of salvation, as well as their very right to live, for an idea impossible of execution, a dream that will never be realized. She feels deep sorrow for those ill-advised rebellious children; but she can never change the legislation by which they live and die excommunicated. They must retrace their steps and abjure their connexion with the secret society to which they belong, and then she will welcome them back, and reconcile them to God whom they have grievously offended. There is absolutely no other way of salvation for them; and they simply make their chance of repentance more and more remote and unlikely, by the impious hope, sometimes entertained, that God will save them eventually on account of the noble purpose to which they are pledged, although the Church has cut them off from her communion.

I trust these words on a subject of very great importance at the present time will not be deemed out of place or uncalled for. Secret societies have a very considerable, although indirect, bearing on home life. It is impossible for a member of any of them to discharge his home duties faithfully and uniformly. The secret oath or pledge or promise by which he is bound will overshadow all his domestic relations, and make him not only unhappy in himself, but the cause of unhappiness to those around him. And when it falls to his lot to imbrue his hands in the blood of a fellow being, we may easily imagine the struggle of his better nature and of divine grace against the terrible crime he is about to commit. How carefully he shuns all avoidable intercourse with his family, until the fatal deed has been accomplished! And oh! what a happiness, if he could forget it then, and return to his former life. But no; it haunts him waking and sleeping, not for a few days only, but for all the days he has to live. Surely the home of such a one has a gloom gathering round it that must destroy all that is brightest and happiest in the relations and intercourse of its members. And how often is that gloom deepened by the shadow of a gibbet on which the assassin has expiated his cold-blooded crime.

Let parents, then, caution their children against secret societies, and against all sympathy with their designs. In every community there are grievances that call for redress; but there are, too, constitutional means of redressing them; and if we use those means persistently and energetically, we shall do a truly patriotic work, will have God’s blessing on it, and will eventually succeed.

The ideal of a Christian home, which the preceding pages are intended to convey in detail to the minds of my readers, may now be put before them in miniature in a very few words. Parents, children, and servants, united to God, through Jesus Christ, by faithful observance of the divine law, by cheerful submission to the divine will, by frequent recourse to the divine help supplied by the Sacraments, by the holy Mass, and by prayer—parents, children, and servants, united to one another by mutual charity, mutual forbearance, and mutual assistance—parents, children, and servants, seeking their own individual sanctification in the uniform practice of the virtues and duties of home. Such is, in miniature, my ideal of a Christian family; and my object in writing the present work is to help as many as possible to realize it.

And what would be the results, were it to be realized? They would be, in the spiritual order, not only the fulfilment of the divine intention in the creation and redemption of man, but also the attainment of man’s own eternal happiness. Home in the divine economy is the great training-school where all those virtues are to be learned and practised by which God is glorified and the soul sanctified. In the social order, too, the largest amount of human happiness attainable on earth would be secured. Man is not destined for perfect happiness in this life; but most of the unhappiness he suffers is the fruit of his own undisciplined life. Let him bring his passions into habitual subjection to his conscience, and his conscience to the divine will and law, and in proportion to the earnestness and completeness with which he does this, will be, as a rule, his immunity from the heaviest, the most prevalent, and the most lasting miseries of our nature. Now, as the faithful and uniform fulfilment of home duties in a Christian manner implies the practice of all those virtues in which our perfection consists, it follows that by such fulfilment we become beyond all measure happier than those whose passions are in rebellion against their conscience, and both passions and conscience are in rebellion against God.

Peace with those around us is one of the most important elements of human happiness; and who enjoys peace so thoroughly as he who lives in a family in which each one vies with the others in consulting their wishes and securing their ease and comfort? Then, again, everyone knows how much an act or word of sympathy, or even a kind, sympathizing look will do to lighten the weight of some heavy trouble or sorrow. In truth, in all our troubles and sorrows we naturally yearn for such sympathy. A child runs to its mother with a wounded finger, or an aching head, or even a broken toy; and sobbing itself to rest in her clasped arms, it feels its pain or grief disappear fast under the gentle influence of her love. In after life a like instinct still remains with us; so that even when we would shut ourselves up with our grief and withdraw from all communion with men, it relieves us more than is generally acknowledged, to hear that some one has called and expressed his condolence, and promised to call again. Now, when any great trial or sorrow comes upon our homes, it is generally shared by all the members alike; and the effort each one naturally makes to console the others, must necessarily help all to feel their burthen less heavily. Thus a truly Christian home lessens the unhappiness, as it increases the happiness of each member connected with it.

The community also in which we live would be benefited, were the families composing it to realize the ideal of home given above. The most important, and, in fact, the primary duty any individual owes to the State is the faithful, uniform fulfilment of his home duties. Without this, there can be no perfect allegiance, no true patriotism. A nation of ill-regulated families is a nation ripe for anarchy, and an easy prey for some despotic hand to seize and crush. And the reason of this is easily explained. People are not enthusiastically devoted to disordered homes, where there is no affection, no mutual respect, no proper authority, no subordination. Now, love of home is, I believe, one of the strongest motives that urge men to labour and make sacrifices for the well-being and stability of their country. If this love, then, be destroyed or have never existed in the families of a community, that community wants one of the strongest ties that can bind it together. “For Home and Altar” was a battle cry of olden times, and was wisely chosen, for it symbolized the two things that men usually hold most dear, and for which they are most ready to die; but it loses most of its significance and power for him whose home is associated with no endearing memory, no parent’s care, no child’s affection.

I mentioned in the chapter on the obedience of children another important influence of home on the State; and I may be pardoned for alluding to it here, as it is by no means the least of the results of which I am giving a summary. Conscientious submission to the laws of one’s country is a duty that we cannot ordinarily violate without sin. To form good citizens, then, it is necessary to inspire them with an idea of civil authority that will make them loyal in heart and conscience, as well as in their outer life. How is this to be done? By the prudent discharge of parental authority at home. The child trained to obey his parents conscientiously will in after life, I am convinced, conscientiously obey the laws of its country. Thus a well-regulated home becomes a nursery of law-abiding citizens, and a source of security and strength to the State.

I have now finished this work, and I look forward hopefully to its beneficial results on a few of our homes, at least. It has been written in the intervals of hard missionary labour, and sometimes in spite of discouragements and obstacles which it was difficult to overcome. One thought, however, sustained me throughout—the practical usefulness of a work like this to all our Catholic homes, and, perhaps I may add, the want that exists among us for such a work. If I have not supplied this want, I sincerely hope that some one more experienced may be inspired with the resolution of supplying it. Meanwhile I pray God that this effort of mine may contribute something towards making our homes truly Christian, and thereby truly happy, as far as happiness is attainable in this life.

The End