The world of Today and Reality

The two basic errors of both Communism and Historical Liberalism on the subject of women are:  (1) that women were never emancipated until modern times, since religion particularly kept them in servitude;  (2) that equality means the right of a woman to do a man's work. It is not true that women began to be emancipated in modern times and in proportion to the decline of religion. Woman's subjection began in the seventeenth century, with the breakup of Christendom, and took one positive form at the time of the Industrial Revolution. Under the Christian civilization women enjoyed rights, privileges, honours, and dignities which have since been swallowed up by the machine age. No one has better dissipated the false idea than Mary Beard in her scholarly work: Woman as Force in History. She points out that, of eighty-five guilds in England during the Middle Ages, seventy-two had women members on an equal basis with men, even in such professions as barbers and sailors. They were prob

A second consideration which should greatly move our hearts to a fear of the Lord is the profundity of His judgments. So the Psalmist says: Thy justice is as the mountains of God and Thy judgments are a great deep(Ps. 35:7). This is a much more moving consideration than that of God's justice, which serves principally to make evil men fear, for the consideration of the profundity of God's judgments is profitable both for the good and the evil alike. As the wise man says: "Who knows if the spirit of the children of Adam ascend upward, and if the spirit of the beasts descend downward?"(Eccles. 3:21). That is to say, who knows whether all the just will be saved or all the sinners condemned, for many times the just man falls from his justice and the sinner is converted by penance. Since the attributes and properties of God are known through His works, it will be well to consider some of His judgments, especially those which we read in Sacred Scripture, in order to show wit