Louis Veuillot: The Liberal Illusion [1866]

[Stone]

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

In selecting for translation Louis Veuillot’s L’illusion liberate, the translator has been guided by what seems to him a great need of our time — a clear refutation of the fallacious slogans of recently resurgent Liberalism.

Rousseauan liberalism was the parent error that spawned Marxian socialism, though it was prone at first to disown and repudiate this disreputable offspring. To-day, however, we see parent and child united in the close, if temporary, alliance of the Popular Front, in which both lay equally unwarranted claims to the much-coveted name of democracy.

Neither of these political ideologies is in harmony with Catholic faith. But while most American Catholics are fully aware that Marxian socialism has been branded with severe condemnation in the encyclical letters of Leo XIII and Pius XI, comparatively few of them are aware that in his Encyclical Libertas praestantissimurn naturae opus (“Liberty, the highest gift of nature”) of May 20, 1888, Pope Leo XIII expressly condemned the equally detestable social doctrine known as Liberalism.

In short, this Encyclical of Leo XIII on Liberalism placed the seal of papal approval as fully upon the contents of Louis Veuillot’s The Liberal Illusion as did the same Pontiffs Encyclicals on the Condition of Labor and Christian Democracy upon the Christian social ethics expounded in Bishop von Ketteler’s The Labor Question and Christianity.


Pope Leo XIII’s Teaching on the Subject of Liberalism

That no Catholic may be an adherent of the French Revolutionary principles collectively known as Liberalism is made clear in almost every line of the encyclical Liberty, the highest gift of nature, excerpts from which we quote below:

If when men discussed the question of liberty, they only grasped its true meaning, such as We have now delineated it, they would never venture to fasten such a calumny on the Church as to assert that she is the foe of individual and public liberty. . . . But there are many who follow in the footsteps of Lucifer, and adopt as their own his rebellious cry, “I will not serve;” and consequently substitute for true liberty what is sheer license. Such, for instance, are the men, belonging to that widely-spread and powerful organization, who, usurping the name of liberty, style themselves liberals . . . these followers of liberalism deny the existence of any Divine authority to which obedience is due, and proclaim that every man is a law unto himself; whence arises the ethical system which they style independent morality, and which, under the guise of liberty, exempts man from any obedience to the commands of God, and substitutes a boundless license. . . . The end of all this it is not difficult to foresee. For once granted that man is firmly persuaded of his own supremacy, it follows that the efficient cause of the unity of civil society is to be sought, not in any principle exterior or superior to man, but simply in the free will of individuals; that the power of the State is from the people only; and that, just as every man’s individual reason is his only rule of life, so the collective reason of the community should be the supreme guide in the management of all public affairs.

Hence the doctrine of the supremacy of the majority, and that the majority is the source of all law and all authority. . . . But . . . a doctrine of this nature is most hurtful both to individuals and to the State. For once ascribe to human reason the only authority to decide what is true, and what is good, and the real distinction between good and evil is destroyed; honor and dishonor become a matter of private opinion; pleasure is the measure of what is lawful; and given a code of morality which can have little or no power to restrain the unruly propensities of man, a way is then open to universal corruption. To turn to public affairs: authority is severed from the true and natural principle whence it derives all its efficacy for the common good; and the law determining right and wrong is at the mercy of a majority — which leads by the most direct route to downright tyranny. The empire of God over man and civil society once repudiated, it follows that religion, as a public institution, ceases to exist, and with it everything that belongs to religion.

There are indeed, some adherents of liberalism who do not subscribe to those opinions, which we have seen to be so fearful in their enormity, and tending to produce the most terrible evils. Indeed many, compelled by the force of truth, do not hesitate to admit that such liberty is vicious and simple license . . . and therefore they would have liberty ruled and directed by right reason, and consequently subject to the natural law and to the Divine eternal law. And here they think they may stop, and hold that no man is bound by any law of God, except such as can be known by natural reason. — In this they are plainly inconsistent ... if the human mind be so presumptuous as to define what are God’s rights and its own duties, its reverence for the Divine law will be apparent rather than real, and its own judgment will prevail over the authority and providence of God.

There are others, somewhat more moderate though not more consistent, who affirm that the morality of individuals is to be guided by the Divine Law, but not the morality of the State, so that in public affairs the commands of God may be passed over, and may be disregarded. Hence the fatal theory of the separation of Church and State . . . ; whereas on the contrary, it is clear that the two powers, though dissimilar in function and unequal in rank, ought nevertheless to live in concord, by the harmony of their actions and the fulfillment of their duties.

But this maxim is understood in two ways. . . . Many wish the State to be separated from the Church wholly and entirely, so that in every right of human society, in institutions, customs and laws, in the offices of State, and in the education of youth, they would pay no more regard to the Church than if it did not exist; and, at most, would allow the citizens to attend to their religion in private if they pleased ... it is absurd that the citizen should respect the Church but the State despise it.

Others do not oppose the existence of the Church . . . yet rob her of the nature and right of a perfect society; and hold that it does not belong to her to legislate, to judge, to punish, but only to exhort, to advise and to rule her subjects according to their consent. But their opinion would pervert the nature of this Divine society . . . ; and at the same time they would aggrandize the power of the civil government to such an extent as to subject the Church of God to the empire and sway of the State.

Common to all these shades of liberal thought is the principle of the State’s indifference to any form of religion, whether true or false. Pope Leo XIII tells us that this can be justified only on the supposition “that the State has no duties towards God, or that such duties, if they exist, may be abandoned with impunity; both of which assertions are manifestly false. For it cannot be doubted that, by the will of God, men are united in civil society. . . . God it is Who has made man for society. . . . Wherefore civil society must acknowledge God as its Founder and Parent, and must believe and worship His power and authority. Justice, therefore, and reason forbid that the State be godless. . . . Since then the profession of a religion is necessary in the State, that one must be professed which alone is true, and can be recognized without difficulty, especially in Catholic States, because the marks of truth are, as it were, engraven upon it. This religion, therefore, the rulers of the State must preserve and protect if they would provide, as they ought, with prudence . . . for the good of the community.”

It is clear, then, that no Catholic may positively and unconditionally approve of the policy of separation of Church and State. But, given a country like the United States, where religious denominations abound and the population is largely non-Catholic, it is clear that the policy of treating all religions alike becomes, all things considered, a practical necessity, the only way of avoiding a deadlock, Under such circumstances, separation of Church and State is to be accepted, not indeed as the ideal arrangement, but as a modus vivendi. Hence Pope Leo concludes:

There remain those who, while they do not approve the separation of Church and State, think nevertheless that the Church ought to adapt herself to the times and to conform to what is desired by the modern system of government. Such an opinion is sound, if it is to be understood of an adaptation that is consistent with truth and justice: in so far, namely, that the Church, in the hope of some great good, may show herself indulgent, and may conform to the times in whatever her sacred office permits. But it is not so in regard to practices and doctrines which a perversion of morals and a false judgment have unlawfully introduced. Religion, truth and justice must ever be maintained. . . .

From what has been said it follows that it is in no way lawful to demand, to defend, or to grant, unconditional freedom of thought, of speech, of writing, or of religion, as if they were so many rights which nature had given to man. For if nature had really given them, it would be lawful to refuse obedience to God, and there would be no restraint to human liberty. It likewise follows, that freedom in these things may be tolerated when there is just cause; but only with such moderation as will prevent its degenerating into license and excess. And where such liberties are in use, men should use them in doing good and should regard them as the Church does. . . .

Again it is not of itself wrong to prefer a democratic form of government, if only the Catholic doctrine be maintained as to the origin and use of power. Of the various forms of government, the Church does not reject any that are suited to the welfare of their subjects. . . . And the Church approves of everyone giving his services for the common good, and of doing all that he can for the defense, and preservation, and prosperity of his country.

History of Liberalism

Such, then, is the satanic and antisocial error of liberalism: satanic, because it refuses to bend the knee before Divine truth and Divine authority; antisocial, because it is a doctrine of selfish individualism, which gives free rein to greed and egoism at the expense of the common good. What were its historical beginnings?

Its roots lie deep in the paganizing Humanism of the fifteenth century. As Greek men of letters — refugees from Turk-ridden Constantinople — diffused knowledge of the Greek classics in Europe, and as the first excavations brought to light masterpieces of Roman sculpture and architecture, men began to conceive an intense admiration for the pagan cultures of Greece and Rome and to question the spiritual values of Christian culture. In the sequel, the desire to have unhampered liberty and to model life on the licentious lines of Grecian paganism became increasingly general. Men lost sight of the fact that Christian culture had added to pagan beauty of form and color the superior beauty of idea; they likewise failed to appreciate that, in imposing morality, the Church was consulting their own best interests, and was only forbidding what tended to corrupt human nature, not what tended to perfect it either spiritually or physically. Swinburne, in his Rape of Proserpine, has eloquently voiced the passionate protest of pagan and neo-pagan against their common kill -joy — Christian morality:

Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? but these thou shalt not take: The laurel, the palm and the paean, the breasts of the nymphs in the brake,

And all the wings of the loves; and all the joy before death.

Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown gray with Thy breath.

In the next century we have the yet more emancipating ethics of Martin Luther (1483-1546), who found room in his synthesis of current errors for the complete freedom of morals demanded by the paganizing humanists. Man’s will-power, he claimed, had been so ruined by original sin that it was useless to struggle against temptation. “Be a sinner and sin boldly,” he urges in a letter he wrote in 1521, “but believe yet more staunchly and rejoice in Christ.” 1 Like the neo-pagans of Humanism, the Christian, too, might henceforth enjoy full liberty of action. Beyond faith he had no other duties. He might indulge to his fill in sin. If only he retained an unwavering faith that God, in view of the merits of Christ, would not take account of his wicked deeds, he need have no fear on that score as to his salvation. No wonder that Luther, in his Treatise on Christian Liberty, exclaims: “The Christian is the freest lord of all things, subject to no one!”

Calvin (1509-1564) appropriated Luther’s principle of the impossibility of meriting salvation by virtuous conduct, and so “Christian liberty” came to Geneva, whence it traveled to Scotland and to newly “reformed” England. Here it received a still more progressive mouthpiece in the person of that forerunner of Rousseau and Smith — Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). He gave mankind this conception of liberty:

“The right of Nature” ... is the liberty each man hath to use his own power as he will himself for the preservation of his own nature, that is to say, of his own life; and consequently of doing anything which in his own judgment and reason he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto.

By “liberty” is understood, according to the proper signification of the word, the absence of external impediments: which impediments may oft take away part of man’s power to do what he would. 2 3

From Geneva, too, came the real Father of political liberalism, Calvinist Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). In his famous du Contrat Social (“On the Social Contract”) this man developed Hobbes’s fantasy that Civil society had its origin in a pact. He begins this book with the much-quoted sentence: “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” In the next chapter, he adds:

This common liberty is a consequence of man’s nature. His first law is to attend to his own preservation, his first cares are those which he owes to himself; and as soon as he comes to the years of discretion, being sole judge of the means, adapted for his own preservation, he becomes his own masters. Since no man has any natural authority over his fellow men, and since force is not the source of right, contracts remain as the basis of all lawful authority among men. 4 5

But in order that such a contractual form of association may be legitimate, he argues, the problem will be “to find a form of association which may defend and protect with the whole force of the community the person and property of every associate, and by means of which, each coalescing with all may nevertheless obey only himself and remain as free as before.” 5

This problem finds its solution in that which, according to Rousseau, is the basis of all civil societies, or States; namely the social contract between free and equal individuals in which “each giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody; and as there is not one associate over whom we do not acquire the same rights which we concede to him over ourselves, we gain the equivalent of all that we lose, and more power to preserve what we have.” 6 7

The essence of the social contract is: “Each of us puts in common his person and his whole power under the supreme direction of the general will; and in return we receive every member as an indivisible part of the whole.” But what happens when the will of an individual is not the same as the general will, when it fails to coincide with the majority- vote? If a law is passed against his will, how can a man be said to be obeying his own sweet will in obeying that law? How can individual liberty have its way when it is overridden by the authority of the general will? How is perfect individualism compatible with a functioning society?

Rousseau undertakes to solve this difficulty. “Indeed,” he admits, “every individual may, as a man, have a particular will contrary to, or divergent from, the general will which he has as a citizen. ... In order, then, that the social pact may not be an empty formula, it tacitly includes this agreement, which alone can give force to the others, that whosoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body; which means nothing else than that he shall be forced to be free.” 7 “Forced to be free,” is a sorry jest. The bald fact is that here the general will ceases to be individual liberty and becomes coercive authority.

Now, if the general will of the people is to replace God’s authority as the last court of appeal, it follows that it must be as infallibly right as is the will of God, in the authoritarian conception of society. This Rousseau frankly admits: “It follows,” says he, “that the general will is always right and always tends to the public advantage.” 8 9 Yet it is so obvious that majorities and even totalities of voters are not always right; it is so clear that mob rule seldom fails to be wrong, that Rousseau is forced to resort to a second piece of sophistry in order to save the situation. He distinguishes between the abstract “general will” and the concrete “will of all.” The former, he says, is always right and necessarily points to the public good as a compass needle always points to the magnetic pole. The fact that the concrete “will of all” fails to do this is because, owing to collusions and caucuses among the voters, there is not enough individualism in the social body and so not enough difference of opinion. Any form of association or coherence among the voters tends to impede the faithful expression of the general will, because: “The differences become less numerous and yield a less general result.” This, of course, is the rankest kind of nonsense; for all generalization is based, not upon the differences in a given group of individuals, but upon their similarities or agreements. Nevertheless, this ridiculous idea leads him to the disastrous conclusion: “It is important, then, in order to have a clear declaration of the general will, that there should be no partial association in the State, and that every citizen should express only his own opinion.” 9

This principle was soon to be reduced to practice by the French Revolution, one of the first acts of which was the decree of Chapelier dissolving workmen’s guilds so that the laborer might “express only his own opinion.” It led to the disruption of all “partial associations within the State.” It portended that tragic achievement of Liberalistic misrule, the dissolution of the occupational groups (the guilds), and even of the domestic group (the family). In conformity with this pulverizing policy, Liberalism has spared no effort to break down all organization within the body politic, to extirpate all social organs and to reduce the social organism to a disgregated chaos of helpless human monads destitute of all coherence among themselves, like so many bird-shot in a cartridge.
As though from this incoherent mass of divided individuals, anything like a coherent voice or intelligent vote on anything could ever arise! To the accusing Socialists, we may turn over the prosecutor’s task of indicting the arithmocratic Liberal for the fearful social havoc he has wrought in all modern States by putting into practice this heartless, pagan individualism of the Contrat social.

Published in 1762, that little book was destined to become the Bible of the French Revolutionaries of 1789. Mirabeau, Mme. Rolland, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Babeuf and the rest harkened to it with reverential awe. For all of them, it was the inspired writing of mankind’s greatest sage, or, as Thomas Carlyle puts it, “the Fifth Gospel” — “the Gospel according to Jean Jacques;” 10 in all of them it awakened, according to Auguste Comte, an enthusiasm greater “than the Bible or the Coran ever succeeded in winning.” 11 The declamatory Revolutionary Confession, entitled “La Declaration des Droits de Thomme et du citoyen,” and voted in the August of 1789, simply formulates the Revolution’s three basic dogmas — the Sovereignty of the people, Liberty, Equality — in texts taken verbatim from the Contrat social. Little wonder that Napoleon was led to declare: “But for Rousseau, there would have been no Revolution.”

However, the Contrat social might never have become the Bible of the Revolution, had it not been first the Bible of Freemasonry, had not the Lodges popularized its revolutionary gospel of liberty, fraternity, equality throughout the length and breadth of France.

Masonry, so the Masonic historian Mackey tells us, was imported into France from England towards the beginning of the XVIIIth century. Soon after (i. e., on April 27, 1738), French Catholics were warned of the danger threatening them by the Bull In Eminenti of Clement XII condemning Masonry. The warning went unheeded; for nothing was done to obstruct the progress of this conspiracy to overthrow Church and State in Catholic France.

Far from meeting with opposition, the conspirators found the ground well prepared for their evil work. France’s prosperity had been ruined by the militarism of Louis XIV (1643-1715), which had saddled the people with an enormous public debt, and by his absolutism, which had broken down the very structure of government itself. In the throes of the depression that ensued during the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI, the people became more and more embittered against the King. Hence, they were only too ready to believe the calumnies that the first Grand Master of the Grand Orient 12 circulated about his royal cousin the Queen, Marie Antoinette. The resulting popular indignation tipped the scales in favor of revolution as against peaceful reform.

The upshot was the Reign of Terror. Thanks, in large measure, to Masonry, the Revolution was brought about in France and on the Continent. A new social order was set up, in which the State was secularized and religion banished from education and from public life. So much for the political liberalism of Rousseau; we have now to consider economic liberalism, the system of the Physiocrats, of Adam Smith and Ricardo, who saw in Rousseau’s principle of unhampered liberty a cure-all for mankind’s economic ills.


Economic Liberalism

This system originated with the sect of Rousseau’s disciples known as Economists or Physiocrats. Frangois Quesnay (1694-1774) and Jean C. M. V. de Gournay (1712-1759) were co-founders of said sect. About 1750 Quesnay, who was physician in ordinary to Louis XV, became acquainted with de Gournay, and around the two the sect of Physiocrats was formed. The Marquis de Mirabeau (1749-1791) is the only member of this group whom we know to have been in personal correspondence with Rousseau; for there is extant a letter of the latter addressed to the Marquis under date of July 26, 1767. Another important member of the superseded the Grand Lodge in 1774 (cf. p. 1299). “When,” remarks the Masonic historian, “on the death of his father he became the Duke of Orleans, he developed a dislike of the King (viz., Louis XVI), who had refused to elevate him to posts to which his rank entitled him to aspire, but from which he was excluded by his blackened reputation.

“Inspired with his dislike for the King and the Court, and moved by his personal ambition, the Duke fostered the discontents which were already springing up among the people” (p. 1296). Thereupon Mackey feels called upon to offer this word of apology for the action of the Freemasons in setting up such a monster as their first Grand Master: “When he was elected as Grand Master, the Duke of Chartres, though very young (only 26), had already exhibited a foreshadowing of his future career of infamy. Certainly enough was known to have made him unfit for choice as the leader of a virtuous society. But motives of policy prevailed” (p. 1297).

In the sequel, this Grand Master renounced his ducal title, proclaimed himself “Le Citoyen Philippe Egalite” ( Citizen Philip Equality ) and, having been elected to the National Assembly, voted for the death of his cousin, King Louis XVI. Unfortunately for himself, however, he became so enamored with equality that he made the mistake of resigning his Grand Mastership and of repudiating Masonry. This he did in a letter dated May 15, 1793. His indignant fellow Masons anathematized him in solemn conclave and, breaking his Grand Master’s sword, declared said office vacant. Five months later this scoundrelly ex-Grand Master was guillotined, viz., on October 31, 1793. (See op. cit., pp. 1303-1304.)

The system of the Physiocrats, which is set forth in Quesnay’s Tableau economique (“Economic Situation”), is an agricultural system of economy, which holds the produce of the land to be the sole source of the revenue and wealth of every country. What is distinctively Rousseauan about it is Quesnay’s contention that under a regime of perfect liberty, with no restraints imposed, there will be a natural distribution of wealth conducive to the highest prosperity.

De Gournay, too, held that the prosperity of the State would necessarily result from free and unrestricted competition among the citizens. He expressed this view in his famous saying: “Laissez faire, laissez passer, le monde va de lui meme” — Let things alone, let things pass, the world goes on of itself.

Turgot, laying less stress on agriculture; advocated perfect freedom of commerce and industry as the best means of augmenting public and private wealth; it was his system, known as “le liberalisme economique,” which alone won the unqualified approval of Adam Smith (1723-1790); but outside of France proper, it was Adam Smith himself who came to be hailed as the founder of economic liberalism.

When Adam Smith visited the Continent (1764-1766), he formed the acquaintance of Quesnay and of several other Physiocrats, such as Turgot and Mirabeau, but de Gournay, of course, was already dead. Rousseau was still alive, but he was not among the liberalistic doctrinaires whom Smith met at Paris. However, Smith’s friend, David Hume, knew Rousseau and sheltered him in his own home when the author of the Social Contract came as a refugee to England. In 1784 Adam Smith published his famous work on political economy, The Wealth of Nations. In this work, he formulated the basic principle of economic liberalism in these memorable words:

All systems of either preference or restraint, therefore, being thus completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men. The sovereign is completely discharged from . . . the duty of super-intending the industry of private people, and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interest of society.

This is that system of natural liberty, which has unchained all greed to prey upon all weakness; this is that system of equal opportunity, which has produced an increasingly wealthy group of millionaires and an increasingly impoverished multitude of expropriated workers; this is that system of rugged individualism that has made human life a war of all against all — a pitiless Darwinian struggle for existence in which the “fit” ruthlessly exterminate the “unfit.” Nor will the chronic social sickness it has brought upon all modern nations ever be cured until the last cankerous vestige of liberalism has been eliminated from human society.

With his “natural liberty” and “removal of all restraints,” Adam Smith gave the freest possible play to “enlightened selfishness.” And by substituting for the just price of medieval days a “price settled by competition,” he paved the way for the cruel exploitation of human labor that has characterized our times. Reduced to practice, it enhanced the inhuman horrors of the Industrial Revolution, revolting the Christian soul of the author of Unto this Last. And John Ruskin did no injustice to Adam Smith in pillorying him as “the half-bred and half- witted Scotsman who taught the deliberate blasphemy: Thou shalt hate the Lord thy God, damn His laws and covet thy neighbor’s goods.”

However, it is not to the devilish individualism of Smith, but to the even more fiendish individualism of his disciple, David Ricardo, that we owe the “iron law of wages.” This outrage on humanity that strangles all pity for the exploited, that degrades human labor to the level of a subhuman thing, that makes of it a marketable commodity subject, like other commodities, to the law of supply and demand, is found in Chapter V of Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy and Taxation:

Labor, like all other things that are bought and sold, and whose quantity may increase or diminish, has its natural price and its current price. The natural price of labour is that which is indispensable to the workmen generally for their subsistence and for the perpetuation of the species. The current price is the price really paid, as the natural effect of the relation between demand and supply, labor being dearer when there are few workmen and cheaper when there are many.

It was the Ricardian law of wages that led straight to the Class War, that tipped with flame the pen of Marx, that made Lasalle a “tribune” of the disinherited!


Religious Liberalism

Here, as is so often the case, the religious question underlies all others; for the plague of political and economic liberalism was born of the godless, soulless, anti-Christian liberalism, which has legislated morals and religion out of public life and relegated them to the privacy of the individual human conscience.

Religious liberalism is the term used to designate that manifold doctrine which, in greater or lesser measure, emancipates man from God, God’s law and God’s revelation; whose practical upshot is the divorce of the eternal from the temporal — the separation of Church and State.

Religious liberalism has three principal forms:

(1) Absolute religious liberalism that emancipates human society from religion by subordinating the Church to the State, which it regards as the one supreme power and the sole source of human rights.

(2) Moderate religious liberalism whose formula is: The Church free in a free State; this emancipates human society by isolating rather than absorbing or suppressing the Church.

(3) Catholic liberalism — neither really Catholic nor really liberal — which seeks to reconcile the irreconcilable, religion with irreligion, the supremacy of God with the supremacy of the State.

Rousseau’s religious liberalism was of the first or absolute type. He aimed at substituting the State for the Church, by imposing a “civil religion,” which would make “each citizen love his duties.” “Outside of this, the State has no interest whatever in religion.” Accordingly, Rousseau preferred the Pagan to the Christian form of worship, seeing that Christianity, “far from attaching the hearts of the citizens to the State, detaches them from it, as it does from other earthly things. I know of nothing more contrary to the social spirit.” 14

According to Christ, religion’s main function is to procure man eternal happiness in the next world, not temporal success in this — For what doth it profit a. man if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own soul? (Matthew 16:26).

According to Rousseau, religion’s main function is to induce men to confine themselves exclusively to material goals; to reinforce with conscientious motives an idolatrous performance of their civic duties. In other words, the Church is to be subordinated to the State and its existence will be tolerated only in so far as it subserves the temporal prosperity of the State.

Absolute religious liberalism is, in fact, the very foundation-stone of Rousseau’s entire political philosophy. As Penty rightly remarks, “Rousseau’s ideas on civil religion do not appear until the last chapter, but they provide the key to his whole position. In order to understand Rousseau, it is necessary to read him backwards.” 

It was his absolute religious liberalism, involving complete subjection of the Church to the State, that inspired the French Revolutionaries to enact their notorious Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which they proceeded brutally to enforce by means of bloody persecution — by means of mass executions of priests and religious.

That truly despotic “liberalism” provoked a natural reaction. Liberals had to cast about for something not so extreme — for a more liberal kind of liberalism, that would not utterly belie its name. They hit on moderate liberalism, which, relinquishing the project of subordinating Church to State, is content to separate the twain.

“The Church free in a free State” — the liberal Catholic finds this revised formula most admirable; for to him it expresses the ideal relation between Church and State. What, he asks, has religion to do with politics? They have different fields, different ends, and different means. Keep them apart, then, and do not mix them up. Give Caesar his due as well as God. Did not Christ distinguish His Church from the State when He distinguished the “things of Caesar” from the “things of God”? That He did make this distinction, is very true, but it is also very irrelevant.

In the first place, it is not of distinction, but of separation, that the Masonic liberals speak. The words are not synonymous. A man’s spiritual soul is not the same as his material body, and so it is wise for him to distinguish his soul from his body. But it would be extremely unwise, nay absolutely suicidal, for him to separate his soul from his body.

In the second place, in Matthew, 22:21 (Mark, 12:17), Christ makes “no distinction of persons,” as if one class of persons (private individuals) were subject to God, while another class of persons (public officials) were independent of the Supreme Ruler. He does make, however, a distinction of things, in the sense that one class of things (spiritual means, such as prayer, the virtues, the sacraments) subserve man’s eternal life and are therefore called “the things that are God’s,” while another class of things (material means, such as houses, food, clothes, tools) subserve man’s temporal life and are therefore called “the things that are Caesar’s,” Caesar being symbolic of the State, whose duty it is to help men fulfill their temporal destiny.

For man, compounded of spiritual soul and material body, lives a twofold life: the one, his temporal life, which begins in the womb and ends in the tomb; the other, his eternal life, which commencing in time shall never know an ending.

Each of these lives has its own purpose and its own set of means. Nevertheless, the temporal welfare man seeks as his earthly destiny is not an absolutely ultimate end. It is by its very nature subordinate to his eternal destiny, which is to serve God, to save his immortal soul and so enter into the happiness of contemplating Infinite Goodness and Beauty forever.

It is the Church’s function to help man on to this eternal destiny; it is the State’s function to help him to attain that measure of temporal prosperity without which right living becomes a moral impossibility. These are different functions unquestionably, but from their difference it by no means follows that the ideal relation between Church and State is one of estrangement — that the two should behave like persons who have quarreled and are no longer on speaking terms with each other.

Finally, common sense will inevitably raise the questions: Did or did not God create Caesar? and if God did create Caesar, how can Caesar be independent of God? If the same God is Author of the State and Founder of the Church, then how can it be His will that His State should refuse to co-operate with His Church?

Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts, all the Earth is full of Thy glory. — The loftiness of men shall be bowed down and the haughtiness of men shall be brought low; and the Lord alone shall be exalted.

The highest civil official rules only with power derived from God and must govern in strict conformity with the divine commands. God is no respecter of persons. The pomp of presidents, emperors and dictators is so much dust in His sight. That is what He plainly tells us on nearly every page of Holy Writ.

Hear, therefore, ye kings and understand: learn, ye that are judges of the ends of the Earth. Give ear, you that rule the people, and that please yourselves in multitudes of nations: For power is given by the Lord, and strength by the Most High, who will examine your works, and search out your thoughts: Because being ministers of his kingdom, you have not judged rightly, nor kept the law of justice, nor walked according to the will of God. Horribly and speedily will He appear to you: for a most severe judgment shall be for them that bear rule. For to him that is little, mercy is granted: but the mighty shall be mightily tormented. For God will not except any man’s person, neither will He stand in awe of any man’s greatness: for He made the little and the great, and He hath equally care of all. But a greater punishment is ready for the mighty. To you, therefore, O kings, are these my words, that you may learn wisdom and not fall from it.” ( Wisdom , 6 :2-10.)

One concluding remark: it may be objected that what Veuillot has written holds true of European liberalism but not of liberalism as the term is understood in America. By the time the reader has finished reading The Liberal Illusion, he will know that this is not so. Meanwhile, suffice it to note that Liberalism’s cardinal principle, the secularization of society, has in the United States nearly two million staunch upholders in the active membership of the Masonic lodges alone, and that Christianity expurgated of Christ is everywhere the so- called “true religion” of Masonry.

Liberal Catholics, too, we shall always have with us; for they are, unfortunately, a universal phenomenon. A friend of the writer calls them “fleshpotters,” defining them as those who, born within the embattled sanctuary of the Church, lean longingly from her sacred merlons (as far as mortal hazard may) to gaze with avid eyes upon the reeking fleshpots of unorthodoxy.

Your liberal Catholic invariably has “good friends among the Masons” and, Papal pronouncements to the contrary notwithstanding, can vouch for them individually and collectively as being above reproach. He has never heard of Leo XIII’s Encyclical Humanum Genus, “On the Sect of the Masons,” and would probably deprecate it if he had. But Grand Commander Albert Pike, pundit of American Masonry, not only heard of it, he read it and penned in reply a bitter attack upon the Papacy.

However, even genuine Catholics are apt to think of the American liberal as not being secularistic and godless like his European brother. If such be the case, the “religious” views voiced by a former famous president of Harvard University, Dr. Charles Eliot, will suffice to disillusion them. Expounding his project of a “new” civic religion — which, to tell the truth, is as old as Rousseau, not to speak of pagan antiquity — he says:

The new religion will not attempt to reconcile people to present ills by the promise of future compensation. I believe the advent of just freedom has been delayed for centuries by such promises. Prevention will be the watchword of the new religion. It cannot supply consolation as offered by old religions, but it will reduce the need of consolation. 16

Now, the atheistic communist is not at all averse to such a statement of the case. He says to the secularistic liberals: “You are quite right in discarding God and the hereafter as outworn superstitions: there is no Heaven for man beyond the grave. Hence, it behooves all of us to get whatever enjoyment we can out of our present existence — all of us, I say: therefore, it is high time that this earthly heaven of ours should cease to be monopolized by a few coupon-holding capitalists and become instead the property of the workers, who are far more entitled than wealthy idlers to happiness here below and who cannot look forward to compensation for present privations in a future life.”

To this, the liberal may reply with tear-gas or with machine-guns, but he can make no logical rejoinder. Atheistic communism is annihilated by the Christian doctrines of Creation, of original and actual sin, of judgment and the resurrection of the dead, but to all attacks leveled at it from the premises of godless and soulless liberalism, it is absolutely invulnerable.

1 Epist. Luth. a Ioh. Aurifabro collectae I (Jen. 1556) 345.
2 Leviathan, Ch. XIV
3 Contrat social, Bk. I, Chap. II.
4 Ibid., Bk. I, Chap. IV.
5 Ibid., Bk. I, Ch. VI.
6 Ibid., Bk. I, Ch. VI.
7 Ibid., Bk. I, Ch. VII.
8 Ibid., Bk. II, Ch. III.
9 Ibid., bk. II, ch. III.
10 The French Revolution, bk. I, II, ch. VII, p. 44)
11 Politique positive, t. Ill, ch. VII).
12 As their Grand Master to lead this crusade against royalty and the Church in France, the Freemasons elected Philip, the dissolute Duke of Chartres (afterwards  Duke of Orleans). In volume IV of Mackey’s History of Masonry (New York, 1921) we  are told that he was elected Grand Master of the Old Grand Lodge of France on June 24, 1771 (cf. p. 1290), becoming Grand Master of the Grand Orient.
13 The Wealth of Nations, Cannan ed., London, 1904, vol. II, bk. IV, ch. IX, p. 184.
14 Contrat Social, bk. IV, ch. VIII.
15 A Guildmaris Interpretation of History, London, 1920, p. 198.
16 Charles Elliott, The New Religion.