Louis Veuillot: The Liberal Illusion [1866]

[Stone]

The Liberal Illusion

Chapter XIV

Such being the case in the sight of God, I deny to the Christian — to him who is bound to obey — the right to authorize disobedience to represent him. I deny him not only the right to create, but even the right to accept without protest, a power that sets itself up independently of God.

Liberal Catholicism denies that the civil power can be Christian; I deny that it can with impunity be anything else and that we can with impunity dispense ourselves from doing all our religion commands and commends in order to keep it Christian or to make it become Christian.

The power, which is not Christian and which is without other religion, is diabolical, it is theocracy in reverse. If we are forced to submit to such a misfortune and such a shame, it will be an even greater misfortune and shame for the world than it is for us. We, by the grace of God, will deliver ourselves from it, and we alone have the power to deliver the world from it. But to work for it, to build up with our own hands a government godless on principle, to hold as sacred this preposterous and vile thing, that would be treason against mankind. Humanity would call us to account for it before the tribunal of God. It would accuse us of having extinguished the lamp, of having been accomplices of the darkness in which death resides.

Methinks I hear Tertullian speaking to the Christian maker of idols: “Can you preach one only God, you who make of Him so many? Can you preach the true God, you who make of Him counterfeits? — I make them, you will say, I do not adore them. — The same reason that forbids you to adore them likewise forbids you to make them: in both cases it is the offense it gives to God. But you do adore them, you who make it possible for them to be adored. You do adore them and sacrifice to them your life and your soul; you immolate to them your genius, you offer in libation to them your sweat; for them you enkindle the torch of your thought. You are to them more than a priest, it is your work that gives them their divinity!”24


24 De Idolatria, VI.