Louis Veuillot: The Liberal Illusion [1866]

[Stone]

The Liberal Illusion

Chapter XVI

What a horrible thing and what a horrible farce! It is to the people of Christ that the proposal is made to accept, to choose for their civil rulers ignoramuses who know not that Jesus Christ is God, or blackguards who know it, yet pledge themselves to govern as if they knew it not. And divine blessings are promised to the men and the societies that are capable of this folly and this baseness! This is not what the Holy Ghost tells them. The children of Israel, having consecrated themselves to Beelphegor, God said to Moses: “Take all the princes of the people, and hang them up on gibbets against the sun: that my fury may be turned away from Israel.” 26 There you have a note to enter in the annals of freedom of worship — of religious liberty. It is said besides that “justice exalteth a nation: but sin maketh nations miserable.”27 What does Liberalism make out of this oracle? Does it declare it repealed or is it minded to pretend that the justice in question here is the impracticable art of preserving just the right balance between Jesus, Luther, Mahomet and Joe Smith,28 between God and Belial? Jesus wants no such equilibrium: “He that is not with me, is against me.”29

“Know, Emperor, wrote St. Gregory the Great, know that power has been given you from on high, in order that virtue may be aided, that the ways of heaven may be widened, and that the empire of Earth may serve the empire of Heaven.” This is Bossuet’s translation.

But, undeniably, these are old sayings and old divine ideas. To begin with, the world has changed, and when all is said and done, one has to follow the current.



26 Numbers, 25:4.
2 7 Proverbs, 14:34.
28 Founder of the American sect of the Mormons.
29 Matth., 12:30.