Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/171

the sea, become merged at the present day in those schools which are at the same time atheistical and socialistic. The liberal school, properly so called, struggles to be at rest on the eminence which it has attained, where it is placed between two seas, whose constantly advancing waves will finally overwhelm it, between socialism and Catholicism. We at present speak only of this division of the liberal school, and we assert of it that, as it cannot admit the constituent sovereignty of the people without becoming democratic, socialistic, and atheistic, nor admit the actual sovereignty of God without becoming monarchical and Catholic, it admits on the one side the original sovereignty of God, and on the other the actual sovereignty of human reason. It will therefore be perceived that we were right in affirming that the liberal school does not proclaim the human right, except as originally derived from the divine right.

This school admits no other evil than that which proceeds from the transferring of government from the place in which God established it from the beginning of time; and as material things always remain subject to the physical laws which were contemporaneous with the creation, the liberal school denies evil in the universality of things; but, as it happens that the government of societies is not something certain and fixed with the philosophic dynasties, which by divine appointment possess the exclusive right to govern human affairs, the liberal school admits evil in society, whenever the governing power passes out of the hands of the philosophers or the middle classes, and is exercised by kings or the lower classes.

Of all the schools this is the most unsatisfactory, be-