Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/295

his law, they deny their own existence. To deny the divine law and to affirm the human law, to affirm crime and to deny sin, to deny God and affirm any government whatever, is to deny what one affirms, and to affirm what one denies it is to commit the most palpable contradictions. Then society is exposed to the storms of revolution, which soon restore the logical empire that governs human affairs, by suppressing human contradictions either with an absolute and inexorable affirmation or with an absolute and peremptory negation.

The atheism of the law and of the state, or, what amounts to the same thing expressed in a different manner, the complete secularization of the law of the state, is a theory which can never coincide with the theory of penalty. The first comes from man in his condition of voluntary separation from God, and the other comes from God when in a state of union with man.

Governments seem to be endowed with an unerring instinct which teaches them that they can only be just or strong in the name of God. Thus, it happens that whenever they commence to secularize, that is to say, to separate themselves from God, they always begin to relax the severity of penalties, as if they were conscious that their right was weakened. The loose modern theories respecting criminal law are contemporaneous with the decadence of religion, and they have prevailed in the codes whenever the complete secularization of political power was established. When this takes place, the criminal becomes gradually transformed in the eyes of men, until finally what was regarded with horror by our ancestors only excite the commiseration of their children. He who was formerly called criminal, even loses this name and is spoken of as eccentric or insane. The