Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/49

lute emancipation. Everywhere she has upheld the rights of God and the inviolability of his holy commandments. There is no truth that she has failed to proclaim, nor error that she has not anathematized. Liberty in truth she has always held sacred, but liberty in error is as hateful to her as error itself. She looks upon error as born and existing without rights, and she has therefore pursued, resisted, and extirpated it in the most hidden recesses of the human mind. As the perpetual illegitimacy and ignoring of error has been a religious dogma, so has it also been a political dogma, proclaimed in all ages and by all rulers. All have considered as beyond the pale of discussion the principle on which their power rested; all have denounced as error, and have deprived of all legitimacy and right, any principle opposed to that principle. They have all considered themselves infallible in this judgment, without appeal, and if all political errors have not been condemned, it is not because the conscience of mankind recognizes the legitimacy of any error, but because it has never admitted, in any human potentates, the privilege of infallibility in the qualification of error. As a consequence of this radical incapacity of human potentates to discriminate error, has arisen the principle of freedom of discussion, the foundation of modern constitutions. This principle does not suppose in society, as might appear at first sight, an incomprehensible and culpable impartiality between truth and error; it is based upon two other hypotheses, one of which is true and the other false. The first supposition is, that those who govern are not infallible, which is an evident truth; the other is based on the infallibility of discussion, which is false in every point of view. Infallibility cannot result