circumstances, for our greatest sins, but here it is useless to seek for any.  God gives faith.  It is lost only through our own fault.  God abandons them that abandon Him.  Apostasy is the most patent case of spiritual suicide, and the apostate carries branded on his forehead the mark of reprobation.  A miracle may save him, but nothing short of a miracle can do it, and who has a right to expect it?  God is good, but God is also just.

It is not necessary to pose as an apostate before the public.  One may be a renegade at heart without betraying himself, by refusing his inner assent to a dogma of faith, by wilfully doubting and allowing such doubts to grow upon him and form convictions.

People sometimes say things that would brand them as apostates if they meant what they said.  This or that one, in the midst of an orgy of sin, or after long practical irreligion, in order to strangle remorse that arises at an inopportune moment, may seem to form a judgment of apostasy.  This is treading on exceedingly thin glass.  But it is not always properly defection from faith.  Apostasy kills faith as surely as a knife plunged into the heart kills life.

A schismatic does not directly err in matters of faith, but rejects the discipline of the Church and refuses to submit to her authority.  He believes all that is taught, but puts himself without the pale of the Church by his insubordination.  Schism is a grievous sin, but does not necessarily destroy faith.

The source of all this unbelief is, of course, in the proud mind and sensual heart of man.  It takes form exteriorly in an interminable series of “isms” that have the merit of appealing to the weaknesses of man.  They all mean the same thing in the end, and are only forms of paganism.  Rationalism and Materialism are the most frequently used terms.  One stands on reason alone, the other, on matter, and both have declared war to the knife on the Supernatural.  They tell us that these are new brooms destined to sweep clean the universe, new lamps intended to dissipate the clouds of ignorance and superstition and to purify with their light the atmosphere of the world.  But, truth to tell, these brooms have been stirring up dust from the gutters of passion and sin, and these lamps have been offending men’s nostrils by their smoky stench ever since man knew himself.  And they shall continue to do service in the same cause as long as human nature remains what it is.  But Christ did not bring His faith on earth to be destroyed by the lilliputian efforts of man.

CHAPTER XXV.  HOW FAITH MAY BE LOST.

It is part of our belief that no man can lose his faith without mortal sin.  The conscious rejection of all or any religious truth once embraced and forming a part of Christian belief, or the deliberate questioning of a single article thereof, is a sin, a sin against God’s light and God’s grace.  It is a deliberate turning away from God.  The moral culpability of such an act is great in the extreme, while its consequences cannot be weighed or measured by any human norm or rule.