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All the active spirits seemed to hate religion. A small minority of anti-Christians was allowed entire control of Italy and France, and exhibited in the government of those foremost Catholic commonwealths a pagan ferocity against everything sacred; and this was met by "timid listlessness" on the part of the Catholic majority.
And, on the other hand, would not the men who, in the decline of Christianity raised themselves above all, and regarded themselves as the teachers of the purest Christianity, would not these very men, in the times of the apostles and disciples of Christ, have been regarded as the most shameless heretics and anti-Christians?"
Again, this esteem is mingled with aversion: it reproaches them with the violent decrees they have passed in concert with the "Mountain;" with persecutions, confiscations, every species of injustice and cruelty; it always sees the King's blood on their hands; they, too, are regicides, anti-Catholics, anti-Christians, demolishers and levelers.
Darwinism leads to a denial of God. Nietzsche carried Darwinism to its logical conclusion and it made him the most extreme of anti-Christians. I had read extracts from his writings enough to acquaint me with his sweeping denial of God and of the Saviour but not enough to make me familiar with his philosophy.
It is not a mixture like russet or purple; it is rather like a shot silk, for a shot silk is always at right angles, and is in the pattern of the cross. So it is also, of course, with the contradictory charges of the anti-Christians about submission and slaughter.
According to the priestesses of this "unrecognised" cult, Father Ivan was the Saviour Himself, though he hid the fact on account of the "Anti-Christians" that is to say, the priests and the church authorities. Those who were converted to the new doctrine placed his portrait beside that of the Divine Mother, and prayed before it.
I assure you it would excite any human heart to behold the place where the ancient Christians were concealed under the earth from the persecution of the anti-christians. Indeed they were concealed by the power of God. They sought Jesus and Him alone they loved.
His disagreements with his ministers also proved many and serious, and the letters from Pekin note, with more than a gleam of satisfaction, that those who were most prominent as Anti-Christians suffered most heavily.
But I found that the anti-Christians themselves had a contempt for woman's intellect; for it was their great sneer at the Church on the Continent that "only women" went to it. Or again, Christianity was reproached with its naked and hungry habits; with its sackcloth and dried peas.
Thus, certain sceptics wrote that the great crime of Christianity had been its attack on the family; it had dragged women to the loneliness and contemplation of the cloister, away from their homes and their children. The charge was actually reversed. Or, again, certain phrases in the Epistles or the marriage service, were said by the anti-Christians to show contempt for woman's intellect.
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