Anti-christianism in Europe #181131

If it is true that a nation is what its doctrines are, it becomes very easy to discover in the doctrines of contemporary Europe the last reason of the troubles and revolutions which keep it in constant turmoil. It has sowed the wind, now it is reaping the whirlwind. It has destroyed the foundations, and it is but natural that the edifice should begin to fall to its ruin. The English Socinians, followed by Voltaire, uprooted the Christian idea, and Rousseau after denying the true nature of God, set up the worship of man in His place. From these ancestors was born a generation of rationalists and atheists, who celebrated their triumphs, first in the French Revolution, and afterwards in the general dissolution of organized society. Out of the jumble of confused systems arose all those philosophic, religious, moral, and social aberrations which strive to root themselves in the human mind of the twentieth century. Among the Catholics themselves, whenever ambition or the malign influence of worldly allurements were in the ascendant, there were here and there excrescences of error which tended to diminish the vigor and integrity of the Christian spirit, and lead to that mongrel condition characterized under the name of "Liberal Catholicism."