Catholic during the Great Apostasy

The human spirit, for which truth is the light, is sometimes eclipsed when it either does not see the truth, or acts against it. For just as a plant always turns to light, and light is one of the conditions of its complete life, so truth is the light of the spirit and falsehood its night. A plant also needs, in order to develop its life, the influence of warmth; and the spirit, being a moral being, only perfects itself by goodness.

There are many shapes and forms in which an eclipse of the spirit appears. It is sometimes only in the power of comprehension, and sometimes in thought and mind – the will can also act in insanity. The causative causes of this species of eclipse are not always found in an evil organism and in that incalculable array of diseases and disabilities to which civilized peoples more often than others succumb. The spirit is capable of developing such an obscuration in itself, when, either having no element for itself, a long time of one thought – one idea – processing, it falls at last into numbness or into a sickly exaltation of one power to the detriment of others. (…)

It can also eclipse the spirit, saturating it with a multitude of elements that it does not manage to digest and transform into its own thought. More than one scholar has already ended his life in a madhouse.

What to speak of avid anger? What about passionate carnality? These are not madnesses – brief, admittedly, but to the actual insanity of the mind completely similar. Who does not know the consequences of violent fear or sudden and great joy?

And just as truth is the life that enlightens the spirit, so all falsehood is poison to the soul, so he who is an arch liar runs, although he does not recognize it himself – to the madhouse.

There he runs a restless conscience – a spirit conscious of its faults and crimes.

So he has the human spirit and in himself and in this body in which he lives and outside still, a host of enemies, watching every moment for the action of his darkening. And at the same time, oh how narrow is that boundary that lies between the light and the darkened spirit!

At the sight of bodily suffering and disability, we feel sadness and pity in us. How much more pity is needed for the insanity orchestrated by the eclipse of the spirit!

We usually say: that nothing above health is either nicer or dearer. After all, a bright spirit, a pure and holy spirit in a healthy body – greater still is the good. For to be guilty is an evil over which you have no greater. Happy is he whose upbringing was governed by truth and virtue. And although there is no man who is free from error and from sin; yet a good education becomes a guardian and guide for him, so that having fallen he rises – having gone astray and having learned his error, he guards himself against further falls and all care is taken to place all his care on this, so that he is formed more and more on the path of truth and virtue.

(…)
Since momentary frenzy will give place to sound judgment, it will see this new science in its principles the blight of decline. Since the fervor will burn everything will cool down.
For it wants to rely on the same principle that was proclaimed in the sixteenth century, that the Bible is that bedrock on which this new church is to be built.
If the Bible were to be the foundation of faith then every sentence and even every word in it should have the only meaning and be taken in one understanding from all who read it. This is because it cannot be that the writers of the Holy Scriptures wanted to give more than one meaning to their words. However, the bible is supposed to be the foundation of the faith, and everyone is allowed to understand it according to his personal opinion. Does this lead to unity or rather to distinction ?
The Bible is supposed to include all the teachings that are necessary for salvation. But this book is in many places dark and difficult to understand, and so what he who does not understand it is allowed to reject.

This one principle, no matter how many millions of adherents it counts, leads them to constant separation into sects, and then to collapse.
The freedom to translate the Holy Scriptures as one pleases can lead to nothing else than the recognition of these writings as human works, and finally as fairy tales, as German scholars have already done.

Where, then, will this freedom of the spirit that is glorified today end? Where will it lead its followers?

Behold, every step on this road leads to an ever-increasing departure from Christianity and a throwback to the religion of so-called reason.
So build a new church but then you will finish building it when the tower of Babylon is built. Come up with new fashions, but God forbid, do not feed the little ones with this poison.
Or rather, try to get rid of the darkening of the spirit and walk in the truth – for only the truth is real freedom.

You alone, O God, dispel the darkness of error and let us see the truth. Let us learn to know Jesus Christ and His Church more and more and then in the brightness of the truth as we proceed we will find solace and gladness in it.

The eclipse of the visible spirit in the writings of John Czersky. Text from the journal “Defense of Truth.” Monthly magazine of religion and literature devoted to. Notebook I. Monthly January 1845. in Poznan.