Louis Veuillot: The Liberal Illusion [1866]

[Stone]

The Liberal Illusion

Chapter VI

Let us place ourselves at the door of a church; from among the faithful who come to hear Mass, let us select at random a group of fifty human beings, then let us go back twenty-five or thirty years: we shall find that the majority of our group either were not even men thirty years ago, or were wanderers outside the fold of truth. That by and large is the case with all the living. Speaking in the language of Christianity, we may say of the vast majority of mankind, either that they are as yet unborn, or that they are already dead and serve no other purpose than to transmit death.

This — this multitude of children, ghosts and corpses — this is that humanity which is old enough, which has arrived at adulthood, which is mature and perfect! It is now in full possession of reason, enlightenment and justice, capable at last of governing itself. And if God still presumes to govern it, He will do well to do so more considerately for the future than He has in the past, either through laws He will directly inspire, or through laws which mankind itself will know how to formulate without His help, and to which, in any case, His old-fashioned Church does not hold the key.

The Fathers have well said that the Church is incapable of growing old — Ecclesia insenescibilis; but the Fathers themselves are old and the Church is senile; she is positively decrepit. The Holy Ghost — who no longer thinks what He formerly thought — no longer reveals what He thinks to the Church; she has no inkling of it any more! Therefore the Holy Ghost has changed His ways; therefore the eternal God has become different like humanity, which has likewise become different, so different that God’s former directives no longer apply.

Catholic liberalism virtually accepts this more than Protestant view of the vitality of the Sacred Scriptures, of their inspiration and of their interpretation by the Church. It calls upon us to swallow these impertinences, unless we are prepared to see the human race withdraw from us. They set the example, they withdraw. But in separating, it is the Church that they accuse of doing the separating. Another mark of the heretic.