Tuesday of 22nd week in Course
When the prince of this world, defeated on Calvary, began the rear-guard action to destroy as many humans as possible before Jesus’s final return and triumph, he relied on the obvious means. Stir up dissent in the Church so the Church turns away from her mission. Stir up persecution from the Romans, from the Jews, from the local rulers, to dishearten the Church. Raise up major headaches like Mohammed, who by force wrenched vast territories away from Christ, and through terror and totalitarianism keeps Christian missionaries out.
But Jesus’s power is such that, on an open field of battle, He always triumphs. When a human being sees his own weakness and sin, and the inevitability of death, when he feels the power of the Holy Spirit in healings and hears the Word, he often repents and turns to Jesus. That’s the message of St. Augustine, who we celebrated recently, and who is one of the greatest examples of a soul lost in sin and error who by reading a short passage of St. Paul was won to the following of Jesus in the Church. In the spiritual warfare, Jesus wins whenever there is a truly open-hearted soul to hear Him. In fact, as the Gospel today shows, the foul spirits of evil even give left-handed compliments to Jesus when they are driven out.
But the latest tactic of the evil empire, only about 300 years old, is way more effective. It’s called the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment attitude is very simple. Convince people that the only reality, the only thing that is really real, is what they can sense. It started with modern science: the Isaac Newtons and Robert Boyles and Charles Darwin of this world discovered laws and crafted theories that were purely materialistic, that ignored the fact that only in a universe designed by an all-knowing Creator could there even be such laws. It’s a clever idea. You postulate explanations that avoid acknowledging anything other than matter and energy. You throw out data that could shake faith in your theory. You use these theories to make inventions that increase human convenience and health. In other words, you build a world that seems to exist without divine influence, that is crafted to please people with all kinds of useful or pleasurable stuff. You get them to work sixty and seventy hours a week to pile up more goods, and then they are too satiated with stuff and too exhausted to pray. You build a world that doesn’t reject God so much as ignore Him; you flood the world with sexual exploitation to keep men in a kind of perpetual stupor, and women in a kind of perpetual slavery. You build a society that worships consumerism and materialism. That’s how evil traps millions and points them in the direction of death and unhappiness.
But Jesus is still Lord. HE is still in control. We are not children of darkness, but of the light and the day. The Lord is the True Light. The Enlightenment strategy is darkness, yes, but it is also self-defeating. The very device that gave us sexual servitude–the modern contraceptive–is also destroying civilization through an epidemic of STD’s and a collapsing birthrate. If society survives at all, it will be because of the self-sacrifice of the fertile few. We have to keep on preaching the full Gospel of Christ so that it is orthodox faith that survives the crisis, not the other fertile fables of Islam. And we must continually pray that this nation be converted and live in the true Light.
