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Updated: May 29, 2025
We are accustomed to regard France in the light of a parable to other nations, but, if her sorrows and retributions have taught them much, at least her successes and triumphs have taught them more. She has lately shown herself greater even in the hour of her prosperity than in that of evil fortune, the highest praise to be accorded alike to nations as to individuals.
I do not speak of the retributions which we heap upon ourselves in loading our memories with errors and faults, in polluting them often with vile imaginations, or in laying up there a lifelong series of actions, none of which have ever had a trace of reference to God in them.
Some unnamed fear, outweighing their dread of the retributions of Capital, possessed these men, made them supine, derelict in the face of their obvious duty. By the faint grey light of that bitter January morning Ditmar made his way to the mill.
What, however, gratified the public even more than these retributions was the liberation of the aged Chief of Offally from the Tower of London, at the earnest supplication of his heroic daughter, Margaret, who found her way to the Queen's presence to beg that boon; and the simultaneous restoration of the Earldom of Kildare, in the person of that Gerald, who had been so young a fugitive among the glens of Muskerry and Donegal, and had since undergone so many continental adventures.
And so we may be subject to certain other laws, in various departments of our complex experience, without being either restrained or impelled by such external coaction as alone can exempt creatures, constituted as we know and feel ourselves to be, from the righteous retributions of God.
By judgments are not meant merely the acts of God's punitive righteousness, the retributions that destroy evildoers, but all God's decisions and acts in regard to man. Or, to put it into other and briefer words, God's judgments are the whole of the 'ways, the methods of the divine government.
But all that, remember, is only half the story. Our Lord here is not giving us a complete view of the retributions of the heavens, He is only telling us one aspect of them. Repose, society, gladness, satisfaction, these things are all true. But heaven is not lying upon couches and eating of a feast.
At the threshold of national existence these men were constrained by circumstances to make an exception to the primary principles which they had placed at the bottom of their untried and bold experiment in popular government. This sacrifice of fundamental truth carried along with it one of the sternest retributions of history.
It is the weak person who is constantly threatening the child with terrible retributions for his disobedience. Yet none are quicker to detect the weakness, none know better that the threats will not be carried out, than those very children whose obedience we desire thus to obtain.
"We know nothing but what Fray Ignatius tells us that the Americans have been everywhere pulling down churches, and granting martyrdom to the priests, and that everywhere miraculous retributions have pursued them." "Was Gonzales a retribution? The Senor Doctor came to us while we were there. God be blessed; but he startled us like the rattle of rifle-shots in the midnight!
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