Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/260

these doctrines were hidden under the very terms that she makes use of. They would long since have brought about the final catastrophe of the world, had the Church been unable to eradicate them. The real danger for human society commenced when the great heresy of the sixteenth century obtained a right of citizenship in Europe. Since then every revolution has endangered the life of society. The reason for this is that, all our revolutions having arisen from the Protestant heresy, they are substantially heretical. We see this by the attempt they all make to give a reason for their existence, and to render it legitimate by words and maxims taken from the Scriptures. The sansculottism of the first French revolution sought its historical antecedents and its titles of nobility in the humble poverty of the meek Lamb of God; and among its votaries were found those who recognized in Marat a messiah, and his apostle in Robespierre. The revolution of 1830 gave rise to the doctrine of St. Simon, whose mystical extravagance was the announcement of a kind of corrected and expurgated gospel. The doctrines of socialism, expressed in evangelical formulas, gushed forth, like an impetuous storm-swollen torrent, from the revolution of 1848. Previous to the sixteenth century, men had beheld nothing like it. I do not intend, in making this statement, to assert that the Catholic world had not suffered great tribulations, nor that the Christian societies of ancient times did not experience great vicissitudes and trials; but what I wish to say is, that these fluctuations were not powerful enough to overthrow society, and that these sufferings did not endanger its life. Now, it is quite otherwise. A battle is lost for society in the streets of Paris, and European society is suddenly overthrown, as if by a thunderbolt: e cadde come corpo morto cade.