The World on Its Knees 2.

It is bad to ignore God, as those in large measure do who worship in the temple of pleasure. But it is far worse to deny even His existence, and this is the fundamental doctrine of the god called materialism. The hereafter is a myth; this world is our paradise. Like sensible men, let us here raise our temple and our altar and set up our god and adore him.

The god of pleasure demands apathy towards the true God, but materialism exacts a militant opposition and hatred of Him. For the first time in human history millions of men have waged war, open and avowed, against their Creator. Atheism has been forced on the adult by a system of violence and regimentation that will brook no word of protest, and it has seized control of the schools and injected its virus into the receptive minds of youth. Men deny they are sons of God, ridicule their divine lineage, and become willing slaves of one bragging, boastful dictator after another.

"When a man," writes an Irish Bishop, "refuses to recognize his own parents or friends or insists that they are foreigners or enemies, we know that he is insane. But there is One Who is nearer to us than any parent, greater than all other beings, our Maker and Creator, God. There can be no greater folly or aberration, no more terrible perversion of human reason than to deny the existence of the omnipotent God Who made the whole universe and maintains it in being."

Catholics who use this book will not go so far. They must surely see that Communism is another huge tower of Babel which cannot but be destined for destruction. It too claims the whole man, all his time and energy and talent. It keeps him constantly agitated, with his eyes turned down towards this earth, always preoccupied with the present task and forbidding him take the view of life that asks whither it all leads. Truth ceases to matter except insofar as it serves party interests; human life is ruthlessly disposed of, since men are only cogs in a machine and must be got rid of if they impede it or even seriously threaten to slow it down. Hatred and destruction and violencethese are thy gods, O Israel!

The spirit of another Herod broods over the altar in this temple, the Herod who decreed the slaughter of innocents in an effort, that was to prove futile, to exterminate God. "Communism," writes Pope Pius XI, "strips man of his liberty, robs human personality of all its dignity, and removes all the moral restraints that check the eruption of blind impulse. There is no recognition of any right of the individual in his relations to the collectivity, no natural right is accorded to human personality, which is a mere cogwheel in the Communist system ."

Jesus, the very violence and hatred of Your enemies is a challenge to me as a Catholic. It is precisely at such a time that I recognize what an evil thing life is without You. The insanity and slavery I see fill me with gratitude for the sanity and freedom given me with my Catholic Faith. But I dare not stop short at mere expressions of gratitude. The condition that prevails must rouse me to action. Others depend on me to set them free, to show them the truth, to break their chains before they are so firmly forged as to be unbreakable.