Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/296

modern rationalists designate crime as a misfortune. But the day will come when these objects of misfortune will gain the ascendency, and will administer the government, and then innocence will alone be considered as a crime. The penal theories of absolute monarchies, in the days of their decadence, have given rise to the theories of the liberal schools, and these theories have reduced affairs to the extreme peril in which we now find them. After these schools come the socialists with their theories of holy insurrections and heroic crimes; nor will this be the last, for there dawns in the distant horizon a still more bloody future. The new gospel of the world is perhaps writing in a prison; nor will the world suffer more than it deserves when it is evangelized by these new apostles.

Those who have made the world believe that this earth may be converted into a paradise, have yet more readily made it believe that it ought to be a paradise where blood will never be shed. The evil is not in the illusion, but in the very day and hour that this fallacy is everywhere accepted; blood will then gush forth from the rocks, and the earth will become a hell. Man cannot aspire to an impossible felicity in this obscure valley of our dark pilgrimage, without losing the little happiness he already possesses.