Louis Veuillot: The Liberal Illusion [1866]

[Stone]

The Liberal Illusion

Chapter XI

Whenever we say such things, Free Thought raises the cry of “theocrat !“ as it would the cry of “assassin!” It pretends to take fright in a way that frightens us a good deal more than it is frightened itself. By means of this buffoonery, it steps up prudence to a point where it amounts to sheer hysteria, to a point where it amounts to downright betrayal of the truth. It suppresses the assertion, nay, even the bare mention, of the most elementary and necessary Christian right.

Certainly the prudence is not without excuse. For whenever the free-thinkers pretend to be alarmed, they think themselves dispensed from every consideration of reason and justice, and the Church is in for a persecution. The liberal Catholic never fails to play upon this sensitive chord: “Will nothing do you but to preach theocracy? Do you want to have us all stoned?” Yet, just because our opponents are incurably unjust, ought we like cowards to strike our colors, and can it be that not to see any longer, not to know any longer, not to think any longer is the primary condition on which we are to enjoy the liberty that befits us?

Let us scorn the trickery of words, and let not all the lackeys and henchmen of the praetorium, where Free Thought presumes to sit in judgment on the Christ, ever cow us into saying: “I know not the man!” We owe obedience to the Church within the limits that she herself has established, and which for the rest are ample enough, so that rebellion and pride may have no lack of leeway. If this obedience is theocracy, those that are sincerely afraid of it are not very much afraid of something else. In public life no less than in private life, there is but one way to escape from the kingdom of the Devil, and that is to submit to the kingdom of God. We have behind us in history, up to the very threshold of the present, and even in the present, lots of examples of the use which human autocracy has seen fit to make of the two swords. One would not have to search very long on the Earth to find the people that would have everything to gain, including in the first place life itself, were the Vicar of Jesus Christ, the spiritual King, able to say to the temporal king: “Put up thy sword into the scabbard.”