Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/285

some may draw down the anger of God upon the head of all, and that a deliverance from transmitted sin and its penalty may be obtained for all, by a pure victim offered as a perfect holocaust. God condemned mankind for the sin of Adam, and saved it through the merits of his well beloved son. Noah inspired by God, condemned, in the person of Canaan, all his race; God blessed in Abraham, and then in Isaac, and afterward in Jacob, all the Hebrew race. Sometimes he saves offending sons on account of the merits of their ancestors; then again he chastises them even to the last generation on account of the sins of guilty ancestors. None of these things, which are viewed by reason as incredible, have caused either surprise or repugnance to mankind, which has received them with the most pure and constant faith. The gods made Thebes the subject of divine wrath, on account of the guilt of Œdipus, and the merits of his expiation were likewise reversible to Thebes. On the greatest and most solemn day of creation, when the Man-God was about to ratify by his death the truth of all these dogmas, he wished them to be first proclaimed and confessed by this deicidal people. Then arose a turbulent outcry, a supernatural clamor among this people, who pronounced these frightful words: "May his blood be upon us, and upon our children." Does it not seem as if God permitted, in these awful moments, a concentration of time and of dogmas? The very day that this very people put him to death, they impute to one alone, and punish in him, the sins of all, and demand the application of the same law to themselves and their children, in declaring that their sons share a solidarity of sin in common with them. The same day that this dogma is thus unanimously proclaimed