In mixed states, Catholic or
free-thinking, the limit of action, being a merely penal one, invites
incessant contravention.
The puerility of the freethinkers consists in believing that a free
society can maintain itself and keep itself together without a common
faith, without a religious prejudice of some kind. Where lies the will
of God? Is it the common reason which expresses it, or rather, are a
clergy or a church the depositories of it? So long as the response is
ambiguous and equivocal in the eyes of half or the majority of
consciences--and this is the case in all Catholic states--public peace
is impossible, and public law is insecure. If there is a God, we must
have him on our side, and if there is not a God, it would be necessary
first of all to convert everybody to the same idea of the lawful and the
useful, to reconstitute, that is to say, a lay religion, before anything
politically solid could be built.
Liberalism is merely feeding upon abstractions, when it persuades itself
that liberty is possible without free individuals, and when it will not
recognize that liberty in the individual is the fruit of a foregoing
education, a moral education, which presupposes a liberating religion.
To preach liberalism to a population jesuitized by education, is to
press the pleasures of dancing upon a man who has lost a leg.
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