Various and important, as you see, are the problems that confront us in the realms of human activity.  Now, bear in mind, the Catholic doctrine has a solution for each problem and it is your duty to give it.  Knights of Columbus, as you helped the Church to solve the problems of the war, so will you also help to solve the greater problems of peace.  If you wish to be the body-guard of the Church, your mission is to lend your noble and generous efforts to your spiritual leaders in this great work of reconstruction.  For, of this reconstructive period and its great opportunities for militant and active Catholics, we may say what Carlysle said of the period that followed the French Revolution; “Joy was it, in that age, to be living—­and to be young, was very heaven.”  The task indeed is enormous, but the incentive most inspiring.

We are bound to meet with the fluctuations and uncertainties of the human mind, particularly in such times of readjustment and intellectual unrest.  Let us then never forget that since the coming of Christ and the establishment of His Church on earth the principles of His teaching are for all nations.  The sun of truth has its meridian in Rome, on the rock of Peter.  There it stands at its zenith, in the permanent blaze of a perennial mid-day; there it sets the time for the Catholic world amid the ever-changing and conflicting problems of human history. Stat Crux dum volvitur orbis.

[1] A speech delivered in the Assembly Hall of the Knights of Columbus, St. John, N.B., December 22, 1918.  “The Catholic Mind” of New York reproduced it in one of its issues.

[2] R. H. Tierney, S.J., Editor of America, at the Catholic Federation meeting, Brooklyn, September 15, 1918.

CHAPTER XIII.

WHOM DO MEN SAY THAT THE SON OF MAN IS? (MATH.  XVI.-13.)—­PUBLIC OPINION AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

What is Public Opinion—­Its Power—­How is it Formed—­Public Opinion and the Catholic Church—­Our Duties to Public Opinion.

Numerous and strong are the influences at play in human life.  Acting and reacting on the free will of man they are ever at work moulding his character and shaping his destiny.  Like the waves of an incoming tide they are beating the shores of our heart; their triumph is to carry away our liberty on their receding waters.

Surrounding influences for good or for evil are indeed, to a great extent, the determining factors of our moral life.  Day by day they write our history and with it the history of the world; for, the life of every man is but a line on the great page of his nation’s history and the history of a nation, but a chapter in that of humanity.