Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/172

cause it is the least learned and the most egotistical. As we have seen, it knows nothing of the nature of good or evil; it has scarcely an idea of God, and none respecting man. Impotent for good, because it is destitute of all dogmatical affirmations, and for evil, because it detests all bold and absolute negations, it is condemned, without knowing it, eventually to take refuge either in the haven of Catholicism, or to be driven upon the hidden rocks of socialism. This school is only dominant when society is threatened with dissolution, and the moment of its authority is that transitory and fugitive one, in which the world stands doubting between Barabbas and Jesus, and hesitates between a dogmatical affirmation and a supreme negation. At such a time, society willingly allows itself to be governed by a school which never affirms nor denies, but is always making distinctions. It is essential to this school to repress alike all supreme affirmations and all radical negations, and thus, by means of discussion, it confounds all ideas and propagates skepticism; knowing well that a people who perpetually hear from the lips of its sophists the pro and con of everything, must finish by not knowing what to believe, and by asking themselves whether truth and error, justice and injustice, bad and good, are really antagonistic to each other, or if they are only the same thing, viewed under different aspects. Such periods of agonizing doubt can never last any great length of time, however prolonged their duration may appear. Man was born to act, and unceasing discussion is contradictory to human nature, inasmuch as it is incompatible with action. The repressed instincts of the people will soon reassert their sway, and they will resolutely declare either for Barabbas or Jesus, and overturn all that the sophists have attempted to establish.