Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/170

perpetually embodied in certain laws to which material things are from the beginning subject.

It will undoubtedly surprise my readers, and particularly those of the liberal school, that I should trace the liberal doctrine of legitimacy to the divine right, and yet nothing appears to me more evident. The liberal school is not atheistical in its dogmas, although, from its not being Catholic, it is led without knowing or even without wishing it, from consequence to consequence, up to the confines of atheism. Recognizing the existence of a God, the creator of every creature, it cannot deny to the God that it recognizes and affirms, the original plenitude of all rights; or, what in the language of the school is the same thing, the constituent sovereignty.

He is Catholic, who recognizes in God both a constituent and an actual sovereignty; and he is a deist, who denies that God has an actual sovereignty, and only recognizes that He possesses a constituent sovereignty; and he is an atheist, who denies to God all sovereignty, because he denies the existence of God. This being so, the liberal school, in so far as deistical, cannot proclaim the actual sovereignty of reason, without at the same time proclaiming the constituent sovereignty of God, from which the former, which is always delegated, has its principle and origin. The theory of the constituent sovereignty of the people is an atheistical theory, not taught by the liberal school, except as atheism is in deism, that is to say, as a remote but inevitable consequence. Hence proceed the two great divisions of the liberal school—the democratic, and the liberal, properly so called. The first is more consistent, and the second more timid. Democratic liberalism, forced by an inflexible logic, has, like the river flowing onward and lost in