I am neither for immanence nor for
transcendence taken alone.
May 9, 1870.--Disraeli, in his new novel, "Lothair," shows that the two
great forces of the present are Revolution and Catholicism, and that the
free nations are lost if either of these two forces triumphs. It is
exactly my own idea. Only, while in France, in Belgium, in Italy, and in
all Catholic societies, it is only by checking one of these forces by
the other that the state and civilization can be maintained, the
Protestant countries are better off; in them there is a third force, a
middle faith between the two other idolatries, which enables them to
regard liberty not as a neutralization of two contraries, but as a moral
reality, self-subsistent, and possessing its own center of gravity and
motive force. In the Catholic world religion and liberty exclude each
other. In the Protestant world they accept each other, so that in the
second case there is a smaller waste of force.
Liberty is the lay, the philosophical principle. It expresses the
juridical and social aspiration of the race. But as there is no society
possible without regulation, without control, without limitations on
individual liberty, above all without moral limitations, the peoples
which are legally the freest do well to take their religious
consciousness for check and ballast.
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