How is it
possible for a child who has never been out of swaddling clothes to
walk? How can the abdication of individual conscience lead to the
government of individual conscience? To be free, is to guide one's self,
to have attained one's majority, to be emancipated, master of one's
actions, and judge of good and evil; but ultramontane Catholicism never
emancipates its disciples, who are bound to admit, to believe, and to
obey, as they are told, because they are minors in perpetuity, and the
clergy alone possess the law of right, the secret of justice, and the
measure of truth. This is what men are landed in by the idea of an
exterior revelation, cleverly made use of by a patient priesthood.
But what astonishes me is the short-sight of the statesmen of the south,
who do not see that the question of questions is the religious question,
and even now do not recognize that a liberal state is wholly
incompatible with an anti-liberal religion, and almost equally
incompatible with the absence of religion. They confound accidental
conquests and precarious progress with lasting results.
There is some probability that all this noise which is made nowadays
about liberty may end in the suppression of liberty; it is plain that
the internationals, the irreconcilables, and the ultramontanes, are, all
three of them, aiming at absolutism, at dictatorial omnipotence.
Pages:
394
395
396
397
398
399
400
401
402
403
404
405
406
407
408
409
410
411
412
413
414
415
416
417
418