t; and Catholics can sin with a depth
and intensity with which Protestants cannot sin. There will be more
blasphemy, more hatred of God, more of diabolical rebellion, more of
awful sacrilege, more of vile hypocrisy in a Catholic country than
anywhere else, because there is in it more of sin against light.
Surely, this is just what Scripture says, "Woe unto thee, Chorazin!
woe unto thee, Bethsaida!" And, again, surely what is told us by
religious men, say by Father Bresciani, about the present unbelieving
party in Italy, fully bears out the divine text: "If, after they have
escaped the pollutions of the world ... they are again entangled
therein and overcome, the latter end is worse with them than the
beginning. For it had been better for them not to have known the way
of righteousness, than, after they have known it, to turn from the
holy commandments delivered unto them."

And what is true of those who thus openly oppose themselves to the
truth, as it was true of the Evil One in the beginning, will in an
analogous way be true in the case of all sin, be it of a heavier or
lighter character, which is found in a Catholic country:--sin will be
strangely tinged or dyed by religious associations or beliefs, and
will exhibit the tragical inconsistencies of the excess of knowledge
over love, or of much faith with little obedience. The mysterious
battle between good and evil will assume in a Catholic country its
most frightful shape, when it is not the collision of two distinct
and far-separated hosts, but when it is carried on in hearts
and souls, taken one by one, and when the eternal foes are so
intermingled and interfused that to human eyes they seem to coalesce
into a multitude of individualities. This is in course of years, the
real, the hidden condition of a nation, which has been bathed in
Christian ideas, whether it be a young vigorous race, or an old and
degenerate; and it will manifest itself socially and historically
in those characteristics, sometimes grotesque, sometimes hideous,
sometimes despicable, of which we have so many instances, medieval
and modern, both in this hemisphere and in the western. It is, I say,
the necessary result of the intercommunion of divine faith and human
corruption.

But it has a light side as well as a dark. First, much which seems
profane, is not in itself profane, but in the subjective view of the
Protestant beholder. Scenic representations of our Lord's Passion are
not profane to