"You may be sure that no sordid compromises nor carrying of waters on both shoulders will see you through. Those who have the faith had better keep in the state of grace, and those who have neither had better find out what they mean, for in the coming age there will be only one way to stop your trembling knees, and that will be to get down on them and pray. The most important problem in the world today is your soul, for that is what the struggle is about."
Fulton J. Sheen
"Surely, there is at this day a confederacy of evil, marshalling its hosts from all parts of the world, organizing itself, taking its measures, enclosing the church of Christ as in a net, and preparing the way for a general apostasy from it. Whether this very apostasy is to give birth to Antichrist, or whether he is still to be delayed, we cannot know; but at any rate this apostasy, and all its tokens, and instruments, are of the Evil One and savor of death.
Far be it from any of us to be of those simple ones, who are taken in that snare which is circling around us! Far be it from us to be seduced with the fair promises in which Satan is sure to hide his poison!
Do you think he is so unskillful in his craft, as to ask you openly and plainly to join him in his warfare against the truth? No; he offers you baits to tempt you. He promises you civil liberty; he promises you equality; he promises you trade and wealth; he promises you a remission of taxes; he promises you reform.
This is the way in which he conceals from you the kind of work to which he is putting you; he tempts you to rail against your rulers and superiors; he does so himself, and induces you to imitate him; or he promises you illumination, he offers you knowledge, science, philosophy, enlargement of mind. He scoffs at times gone by; he scoffs at every institution which reveres them.
He prompts you what to say, and then listens to you, and praises you, and encourages you. He bids you mount aloft. He shows you how to become as gods. Then he laughs and jokes with you, and gets intimate with you; he takes your hand, and gets his fingers between yours, and grasps them, and then you are his."
John Henry Newman, The Time of Antichrist
Hatred and greed are the children of pride, the first and most powerful disorder of the mind.
We learn its ways; we begin to imitate them; we blind ourselves; we seek to serve ourselves no matter the cost; we rise in expediency; we go along with the crowd who must surely be right if only by force of numbers; we become sick with passion and vengeance; we put aside our conscience, and do increasingly terrible, awful things, in duty to what we serve; and finally, in the end, we become what we hate— a darkness on the face of the earth.
And the love of most will grow cold.
