Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/168

capable of understanding any affair whatever. To this very numerous class belong those whose constant attempt 1s to deceive others, but who always finish by falling victims to their own snares. This s a fact, which strikingly displays the profoundness of the judgments of God, because if God had net condemned to incapacity those who disdain and ignore him; or if he had not placed a limit to the virtue of those who have a remarkable degree of sagacity, society could not have resisted either the sagacity of one class or the malice of the other. The virtue of contemplative men, and the stupidity of the clever, alone preserve the world in a state of perfect equilibrium. There is only one being in creation who unites in himself all the sagacity of spiritual and contemplative natures, and all the malice of those who ignore and despise God and spiritual contemplations—this being 1s the devil. The devil has the sagacity of the former without their virtue, and the malice of the latter without their stupidity, and his destructive force and immense power come precisely from this combination.

As to the liberal school, considered in general, it is not theological, except in the degree in which all schools are necessarily so. It makes no explicit declaration of faith, nor does 1t attempt to define its opinions respecting God and man, good and evil, or the order and disorder in which all creation is placed; but it boasts, on the contrary, that it holds these high speculations in contempt. We may nevertheless affirm of this school, that it believes in an abstract and indolent god, who is assisted by the philosopher in the direction of human affairs, and by certain laws which he instituted from the beginning for the universal government of things.