Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/197

announced by the poets, and expected by the world, will commence when this great event takes place, and when this magnificent aurora dawns upon the horizon. Then the earth will become a paradise, whose gates will stand ever open, and, not like the Catholic paradise, a prison guarded by an angel. Then evil will disappear from the earth, which, until that time, will be a valley of tears, but which is not condemned to be so forever.

Such are the socialist opinions concerning good and evil, God and man. I am sure that my readers will not require that I should follow the socialist schools, step by step, through all the intricacies of their disturbing speculations. This will be the less expected, as I have already virtually refuted them, by presenting the august simplicity of the Catholic doctrine on all these great questions. Nevertheless, I believe it to be a sacred and imperative duty to demolish this edifice of error, and for this purpose it will be sufficient, and more than sufficient, to advance one single argument.

Society may be considered under two different points of view—the Catholic and the pantheistic. Viewed under the Catholic aspect, it is only the reunion of a multitude of men, who all live in obedience to, and under the protection of, the same laws and institutions. According to the pantheistic view, it is an organism which has an individual, concrete, and necessary existence. According to the first supposition, it is evident that society, having no existence independent of the individuals who constitute it, there can be nothing in the society which did not previously exist in the individual members of it; therefore, all good and evil in society must come from man. Regarded in this aspect, it is absurd to attempt to extirpate evil from society