Page:Catholicism in Queensland.djvu/229

Att>ENDi}{. m perfection and sovereign beauty she has ever had' in the divine understanding. Since then she is tot us who navigate in the sea of the world, boiling in , tempests, as a luminous beacon placed on a high rock. She knows what saves and what ruins us ; our first origin and our last end ; in what consists the salvation and in what the damnation of men, and she alone knows it; she rules souls, and she rules alone; she straightens the will, and she alone straightens it; she purifies and inflames the affections, and she alone inflames and purifies them; she moves hearts, and she alone moves them with the grace of the Holy Ghost. In her finds no place, nor sin, nor error, nor weakness; her tunic is without stain; tribulations are her triumphs; the hurricanes and gentle breezes carry her to port. Everything in her is spiritual, supernatural, and miraculous; it is spiritual because her government is of intelligence, and because the arms with which she defends herself and slays, are spiritual ; it is supernatural, because she ordains everything to a supernatural end, and because her duty is to be holy and to sanctify men supernaturally ; it is miraculous because all the great mysteries are directed to a miraculous institution, and because her existence, her duration, her conquests are a perpetual miracle. The Father sends the Son to earth, the Son sends the Apostles to the world, and the Holy Ghost to the Apostles; in this way in the plenitude as well as in the beginning of time, in the institution of the Church as in the universal creation, the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost interfere............ The human race sweats blood under the divine pressure, and from all that blood, and from all that confusion of nations, and races, and peoples, and from all those impetuous whirlwinds, and from that fire which circulates through all the veins of the earth, - the word comes out radiant and renovated, lying at the feet of the Church of our Lord Jesus Christ. .. . . Under her prolific empire, the sciences have flourished, morals, have been purified, laws perfected, and all great institutions, domestic, political, and social, have flourished and spontaneously vegetated. She has had anathemas only for impious men, for rebellious peoples and tyrannous kings. She has, defended liberty against those who aspired to convert authority into.