Martyrs of the Pandemic
YOU are DOOMED if you DO and WE are DAMNED if we DON’T… figure out what I mean by that…
I am reading a little book published in 1865 titled Martyr of the Catacombs. I read the following few paragraphs in chapter 8 today:
The nature of the times in which they lived will explain their situation. The simple virtues of the old republic had passed away, and freedom had taken her everlasting flight. Corruption had moved over the empire and subdued every thing beneath its numbing influence. Plots, rebellions, and treasons cursed the state by turns, but the fallen people stood by in silence. They saw their bravest suffer, their noblest die, all unmoved. The generous heart, the soul of fire, awaked no more. Only the basest passions aroused their degenerate feelings.
Into such a state as this the truth came boldly, and through such enemies as these it had to fight its way over such obstacles to make its slow but sure progress. They who enlisted under her banner had no life of ease before them. Her trumpet gave forth no uncertain sound. The conflict was stern, and involved name, and fame, and fortune, and friends, and life, all that was most dear to man. Ages rolled on. If the followers of truth increased in number, so also did vice intensify her power and her malignity; the people sank into deeper corruption, the state drifted on to more certain ruin.
Then arose those terrible persecutions which aimed to obliterate from the earth the last vestige of Christianity. A terrible ordeal awaited the Christian if he resisted the imperial decree; to those who followed her, the order of Truth was inexorable; and when a decision was made, it was a final one. To make that decision for Christianity was often to accept instant death, or else to be driven from the city, banished from the joys of home and from the light of day.
The hearts of the Romans were hardened and their eyes blinded. Neither childhood’s innocence, nor womanly purity, nor noble manhood, nor the reverend hairs of age, nor faith immovable, nor love triumphant over death, could touch them or move them to pity. They did not see the black cloud of desolation that hovered over the doomed empire, nor know that from its fury those whom they persecuted alone could save them.
Replace one a few words in that passage and you have today, in our midst, the “new Rome”, the “new persecuted”. What is left for us to hold on to? What is left that will make us free once again? For me and my house, it is the sentiment conveyed several pages beyond the above in the same chapter:
Deprived of the opportunity to make efforts for the support of the body, they were forced to make their chief business the care of the soul. They gained what they sought. Earth with its cares, its allurements, and its thousand attractions, lost its hold upon them. Heaven drew nearer; their thoughts and their language were of the kingdom. They loved to talk of the joy that awaited those who continued faithful unto death; to converse upon those departed brethren who to them were not lost but gone before; to anticipate the moment when their own time should come.
Where do you stand? What are you willing to lose, to give up to the brutality of the new Roman State? How can anyone possibly define FREEDOM by becoming SLAVES of the state? You are fools. You have lost the HUMAN quality of free, independent, critical THOUGHT. You have LOST YOUR HUMANITY. What’s more – you have given up your humanity. And for what?? A baseball game? A 31 flavors ice cream? A Sunday breakfast at your favorite restaurant? A plane ride?
Those that have chosen DOOM and now regret it have my deepest sympathy. (If you now fear your own death, you can learn about it on another of my posts) Those that hurl insult and injury against those of us who maintain our right, our freedom to think for ourselves and act out of that freedom – which no one can take away – to you I have no sympathy. Your karma will provide you the chance to fix what is so deeply wrong with you. I pray you listen when it comes back around.
If you are interested in the book from which I shared the above passages, you can find it in my library.