Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/206

verbial among those who are well informed. It is essentially antitheological in being laical; and because it is antitheological it is impotent to give any great impulsion to civilization; for every form of civilization is only the reflection of a theology. The proper office of the liberal school is to falsify all principles, by capriciously and absurdly combining them with others which contradict them. They imagine to attain, in this way, an equilibrium, while they simply arrive at confusion. They think to acquire peace, and they go to war. But as it is impossible to escape altogether the authority of theology, the liberal school is less laic than it imagines, and it is more theological than it appears to be at first sight. Thus the question of good and evil (which is of all others that can be imagined the most theological) is defined and solved by its doctors, though in a way which proves how ignorant they are of the art of defining and resolving this question. In the first place, they set aside the question respecting evil in itself—the evil that is the root of all other evil—in order to occupy themselves only with certain forms of evil, as if it were possible that he who is ignorant of what evil is should understand any particular forms of evil. In the second place, they specify the remedy as they have specified the evil, and discover it only in certain political forms, not knowing that these forms, as reason teaches and history proves, are altogether non-essential. Placing evil where it does not exist, and the remedy where it is not to be found, the liberal school has withdrawn the question from its true point of view, and has thereby introduced confusion and disorder in the intellectual world. Its ephemeral rule has been fatal to human society, and during its transitory reign the dissolving