Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: open; Jerusalem without inhabitants; her walls levelled with the ground; her people dispersed through the world, and the world in arms. The eagles of Rome were heard screaming wildly. Rome was seen without Caesars and without gods; the cities depopulated and the deserts peopled; as the governors of nations, men who did not know how to read, and were clad in skins; the multitudes obeying the voice of him who said at the Jordan,
Do penance, and of the other who said,
He who wishes to be perfect, let him leave all things, take up his cross, and follow me; and kings adoring the Cross, and the Cross raised on high in all places. What is the cause of these great changes and transformations ? What is the cause of this great desolation and universal cataclysm ? What has occurred ? Nothing; only some new theologians are going about through the world announcing a new theology. CHAPTER II. Of society under the empire of Catholic theology. THAT new theology is called Catholicity. Catholicity is a complete system of civilisation, so complete, that in its immensity it embraces everything?the science of God, the science of the angel, the science of the universe, and the science of man. The infidel falls into ecstasy at sight of its inconceivable extravagance, and the believer at sight of its wonderful grandeur. If there be any one who, on beholding it, passes by with a smile, people, more astounded at such an amount of stupid indifference than at that colossal grandeur and that inconceivable extravagance, raise their voice, and say,
Let the fool pass. All humanity has studied for the space of eighteen centuries in the school of its theologians and its doctors; and at the end of so much application, and the end of so much study, up to to-day the abyss of its science has not b…
