Political liberty,
religious liberty, universal education, the enfranchisement and
elevation of women, the abolition of slavery, temperance, almost
everything has been achieved, until the world, the face of it, has been
transformed. And yet Pope Pius IX., in an encyclical which he issued a
little while before his death, pronounced, ex-cathedra and infallibly,
the opinion that this whole modern society was godless. And yet, as I
said, this godless modern world has done more for man and for the glory
of God than the fifteen hundred years of church dominance that preceded
it.
For the sake of man, then, that intellectually, politically, socially,
industrially, every other way, he may be free to grow, to expand, to
adopt all the new ideas that promise higher help, hope, and freedom,
for the sake of man, we refuse to be bound by the inherited and fixed
opinions of the past.
Now two or three points I wish to speak of briefly, as I near the
close.
We are charged sometimes, because we have no creed, with having no bond
of union whatever. As I said a few Sundays ago, they say that we are
all at loose ends because we are not fixed and bound by a definite
creed.
What is God's method of keeping a system like this solar one of ours
together? Does he fence it in? Does he exert any pressure from outside?
Or does he rather place at the centre a luminous and attractive body,
capable of holding all the swinging and singing members of the system
in their orbits, as they play around this great source of life and of
light? God's method is the method of illumination and attraction.
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