Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/181

and crush the blasphemer. Thus we hear some deny God by saying, all that exists is God, and God is all that exists; while others affirm that God and humanity are identical. Among these, some maintain that there is in humanity a dualism of contrary forces and energies, and that man is the representative of this dualism. Those who entertain this opinion distinguish in man the reflective forces and the spontaneous energies. According to them, true humanity resides in the first, and true divinity in the second. By this system, God is neither all that exists nor humanity; he is but the half of man. Others think differently, and deny that God is man or a part of man, that he is humanity, or that he is the universe; but they are disposed to believe that he is a being who is manifested in various and successive incarnations, and wherever there is a great influence or a magnificent domination, there God is incarnated. God was incarnated in Cesar, and in Charles the Great, and in Napoleon. He was successively incarnated in the great Asiatic empires, and also in the Macedonian and Roman. At first he was the Orient, and afterward he was the Occident. The world experienced a change in each of these divine incarnations, and advanced a step in the path of progress each time that it changed, in consequence of a new incarnation.

All these antagonistic and absurd systems are embodied in a man who has appeared in the world, in these latter days, as the personification of all the inconsistencies of rationalism. This man is Mr. Proudhon, whom we have already noticed, and to whom we shall frequently allude in the course of this work. Mr. Proudhon is esteemed the most learned and consistent of the modern socialists; and as regards erudition, he is cer-