Salvation Anxiety

At root, by a complete confusion of the supernatural and natural orders (including a denial of original sin), and a consequent Universalism, men and women alike fondly imagine nowadays that salvation is a given for all irregardless of their faith and works (though any notion of an afterlife turns out to be distinctly hazy, giving out in a breezy denial of knowledge and a nod toward reincarnation).  

With this goes a strange Pelagianism: some believe their purely natural good works - even without real faith in God, let alone repentance for what they refuse to recognize as sin, stemming from a perverse sense of autonomy so strong as arrogantly to reject any teaching daring to dissuade them from their darling passions - are so deserving of praise as to absolve them from believing anything, from obeying anything, that is of God (but which they persist in asserting, ignorantly, to be but the benighted impositions of a false church): and which supposedly testify rather to their uncritiquable probity and righteousness, and to their superior "enlightened" status!  

Gnosticism, blindness, egotism, Satanic pride, sin!  With this goes antinomianism, and a Nietzchean "evil be thou my good" - making every peccadillo (especially sexual, such their overflowing carnality) not merely tolerable but to flaunted and lauded: "their glory is their shame".  And yet, all the while as they bag the Church, they are entirely captive to the sacred cows and mad nostrums of our age, worrying about "land rights for gay whales", as the mocking phrase has it.  Oh deceiving and deceived!

Now, such is inexcusable enough, says St Paul in Romans i, for the pagans - but one finds altogether too much of such an unchristian insanity among the baptized: witness the ongoing rebellion in South Brisbane.  There but for the grace of God - as the Apostle went on to remind his readers - go we all: who can account himself free of sin, free of blindness?  Hie we ourselves to the foot of the Cross as the penitent Magdalen, that Christ of His gratuitous goodness wash us in the sacred laver of His Blood, that we may see, and being healed may begin at last to live lives worthy of our most high calling.  

We ought have a true "salvation anxiety", for in hope we are saved, and yet must work out our salvation in fear and trembling; and we must adhere to all the guides and helps Our Saviour gives us, that is, to prayer, preaching and the sacraments, available to all in His Holy Catholic Church - flying all false doctrine and lying pseudocomforters, who would have us lounge in torpid sloth rather than seek after true sanctity.