Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/328

that moment commence factions and parties, tumults and seditions, sinister outcries, insensate clamors, implacable rancor, unceasing wars, and bloody battles. The poor rise against the rich, the unhappy against the happy, the aristocracy against their king, the people against the aristocracy, and the enraged and barbarous multitudes, transported with passion, struggle against each other in one surging mass, like immense and swollen torrents, which meet and are precipitated into an abyss.

True humanity is in no man-it is in the Son of God; and there is revealed to us the secret of its contradictory nature, because it is on the one hand most elevated and excellent, and on the other, the depth of degradation. It is so excellent, that God has as, sumed it, and made it his own in uniting it with the Word; and it is so elevated, that it was from the beginning and before his coming promised by God, adored in silence by the patriarchs, announced from age to age by the prophets, even revealed to the world by its false oracles, and prefigured in all the sacrifices and by all the types. An angel announced it to a virgin, and it was conceived by the Holy Ghost in her sacred and virginal womb, and God entered into this humanity, and united himself forever with it. And thus perpetually united to God, this sacred humanity was chanted by angels at its birth, proclaimed by the stars, visited by. shepherds, and adored by kings. And when the Man God wished to be baptized, the heavens opened, and the Holy Ghost descended, in the form of a dove, upon him, and a voice came from heaven, which said, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." When he commenced to preach, he performed such mira-