Hell’s Amazing Grace by Solange Hertz

To describe the workings of God’s grace in souls, St. Teresa of Avila was fond of using the analogy of water. In The Interior Castle, she tells us: I cannot find anything more appropriate than water to explain spiritual things. Since I know little, and my imagination does not help me, and I am very fond of this element, I have considered it more attentively than other things. Everything that a God so great and so wise has created must have very many secrets from which we may learn, and those who know some of them do so.

Still, I believe that there are more than anyone can understand in every little thing that God has made, even though it be but an ant. Although so commonplace it flows into every kitchen sink, hardly any natural substance is so mysterious as water, over which “the spirit of God moved” even before light was made, when “the earth was void and empty.” Without water was nothing created. As the vivifying river which “went out of the place of pleasure to water paradise” (Gen.l: 2-3; 2:10), water branched out to fructify the whole earth, not only naturally but supernaturally. Consecrated by the Baptism of the Incarnate Word in the Jordan and gushing from our Lord’s Sacred Heart after His death on the Cross, water became God’s preferred means for imparting divine life to souls. Doomed to ape God if he would be like Him, Lucifer had to choose some similar natural element for conveying death to them.

At La Salette our Lady predicted, “There will be extraordinary wonders every place because the true faith has been extinguished, and false light illumines the world.” This false light, source of latter day wonders, can be easily traced to Lucifer, whose very name means “Light-bearer,” and whose vocation from the beginning was to enlighten and energize creation from the heights of heaven. Whereas God redeems mankind by means of water in the sacrament of Baptism, it now appears that the fallen angel intends to engineer its damnation by means of electricity.

This mighty force, pulled from the void by the divine words, “Be light made” after water already existed, would serve as Lucifer’s anti-grace. Pervading the universe before the sun was created on the fourth day, electromagnetism cannot be evil in itself, for Scripture tells us “God saw the light that it was good,” but as Prince of this world, Lucifer was apparently at liberty to appropriate it to his own purposes. Many an aged citizen today can look back on a youth spent without electricity. For thousands of years generations have lived happily without it, relying on simple mechanics and water power to provide their creature comforts, when suddenly, with the onslaught of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, it became a necessity. Without electricity, civilized existence was deemed no longer possible. To civilize meant to electrify. If water still figures as a major power source, that is because it can be used to produce current. Usurping the role of the Holy Ghost as paraclete and consoler, electricity is the very soul of the city of man, indispensable elixir of progress. Via mechanical “pace-makers” installed by electricians in surgical robes, it would even take up its rest in human hearts.

Battening on the sins of men, Lucifer at long last finds himself in a position to bring to fruition what he failed to do at Babel, where men were persuaded for the first time to opt for the artificial. “Let us make brick, and bake them with fire,” they decided, determined to improve on the natural wood and stone God provided them as building materials. In our day, with the help of electric power, these are being replaced by plastics of every conceivable variety, from rooftops to shoes and clothing made from artificial leathers and fibers. Foods are becoming processed chemicals. Planning to transform God’s creation into one of his own devising, Lucifer intends to overlook no detail. Modern society’s dependence on the new energy exceeds that of any addictive drug. Whole cultures have been put at the mercy of whoever controls the current.

First entangled in wires, then in magnetic fields, mankind is driven ever farther from reality. Progressively losing contact with God’s natural world, it is surrendering the last traces of the divine image in which it was created to take on the configuration of Satan ‘s. The hapless citizen cut off from the anti-grace becomes a pariah, automatically excommunicated from common life, where the humblest tasks cannot be performed without it. Unless equipped with calculators, schoolchildren can no longer manage simple sums. Homes and offices, farms and factories, banks and schools, hospitals and laboratories all operate on its power. International corporations, communication and transportation systems alike require its services to function.

All the while supplying the bulk of popular entertainment, electricity runs the government and records every financial transaction. Even aircraft are flown by computers. The child in the womb is not safe from its depredations. Unprecedented material progress of this kind within the space of two hundred years argues for exceptional knowledge of the secrets of nature . The dream of the men of Babel to reach heaven by physical means, which they hoped to do by constructing a tower “the top whereof may reach to heaven” (Gen. 11:4), has been revived by the limitless possibilities of space travel. Infected by Lucifer’s own desire to rise above his assigned place, man now joins him not only in flying above the ground, but those higher regions above the earth which the Fathers of the Church tell us became the preferred habitat of the fallen angels after their expulsion from heaven. What better proof of the quasi-irreversibility of the Great Apostasy now in progress?

Advancing roughshod as it has over the ruins of Christendom in proportion to the decline of the Faith, it can only have been gleaned from preternatural sources, for never could it claim Christian inspiration. Few modern scientists of any stature have been practicing Catholics – who even now cling desperately to their flickering tapers and candles and try to dissuade their children from discharging their Sunday obligations by viewing Mass on television. Nuclear energy may appear to have conferred many benefits, but its firstborn was the death-dealing atom bomb. The sinister direction the electronic age would take should have been clear as soon as the electric chair began replacing the gibbet and malefactors were electrocuted rather than hanged…