Louis Veuillot: The Liberal Illusion [1866]

[Stone]

The Liberal Illusion

Chapter XXI


The first great word of liberty that was ever pronounced, the first great act of liberty that mankind ever saw done, was when those two poor Jews, Peter and John, proclaimed the duty of obeying God rather than men, and went on teaching what error and persecution, under the masks of justice and prudence, would have liked to suppress. 31 Whoever follows their example is free, free from false judges, free from false thinkers; he enters into the impregnable citadel; his thought, set free from cringing terrors, is subtracted from the empire of death; it provides a refuge from slavery for all whom it is able to persuade.

But there are two things to be noted.

In the first place, this act of liberty which the Apostles made towards the powers of Earth is at the same time a great homage of submission towards God, and they were so strong against the world only because they were obedient to God.

In a discourse held at Malines,32 an eloquent discourse, greatly celebrated among the Liberal Catholics, liberty of conscience was traced back to this first and famous non possumus, it was said to have been created and promulgated then. But, quite the contrary, according to the remark of an English publicist, 33 it was that day, it was by that very non possumus, that the human conscience recognized and accepted the curb of an unchangeable law. It was not a principle of liberal liberty to which St. Peter gave utterance: he proclaimed the imperishable, irrevocable duty imposed by God who made it a matter of obligation to preach His Revelation. He did not announce to the world the liberal emancipation of conscience: on the contrary, he put upon conscience the glorious burden of giving testimony to the truth; he did not emancipate men from God. Saint Peter could, on God’s behalf, demand of the pagans liberty for the Christians; he did not give nor did he dream of giving the Christians the license to put error on the same footing as truth, with the understanding that they were one day to treat both as equals, or that truth should ever come to acknowledge error as supreme by divine right in such and such a domain, provided truth on its part were left supreme or tolerated in some other domain. For how could such a humiliated and hobbled truth reply effectively to the countless sophisms of error?

In the second place, the Church alone has the mission to teach this truth that sets free, this unique truth, and she brings conviction of it only to souls that are full of Jesus Christ.

Wherever Jesus Christ is unknown, man obeys man and obeys him absolutely. Wherever the knowledge of Jesus Christ is obliterated, truth declines, liberty goes into eclipse, the old tyranny comes back and retrieves its former frontiers. When the Church is no longer able to teach Jesus Christ, whole and entire, when the people no longer understand that we must obey God rather than men, when no voice is raised any more to confess the truth, without disguising it or paring it down, then indeed will liberty have vanished from the Earth and human history be at an end.


31 Acts, 4:19-20.

32 Discourse of Montalembert to the General Assembly of the Catholics of Belgium in 1863. In it the great orator spoke on two particularly burning subjects: the growing progress of democracy and the relations of Church and State.

33 The Relations of Christianity with Civil Society, by Edward Lucas, discourse delivered before the Catholic Academy of London and published by Archbishop Manning. (Note of L. Veuillot .)