Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/234

mony of things. These same disorders, in their evident manifestations, are a perpetual proof of the Adamic prevarication. Dogma teaches that evil is a negation, and good an affirmation; and reason tells us that every evil resolves itself into the negation of a divine affirmation. Dogma declares that evil is modal, and good is essential; and facts prove that every evil resolves itself into a certain vicious and disordered manner of being, and that there is no essence which is not relatively perfect. Dogma affirms that God brought universal good out of universal evil, and a perfect order out of absolute disorder; and we have already seen in what way all things return to God, although they do so by different ways, thus constituting by their union with God universal and supreme order. If we pass from the universal order to human order, the connection and harmony both of the dogmas with each other, and of the dogmas with the facts, is no less evident. The dogma which teaches the simultaneous corruption of the individual and of the species in Adam explains to us the transmission, by way of generation, of sin, and of the effects of sin, and the antithetical, contradictory, and depraved nature of man, such as we all perceive it to be. This leads us, as by the hand, from induction to induction: first, to the dogma of a general corruption of all the human species; then, to the dogma of a corruption transmitted through the blood; and, finally, to the dogma of primitive prevarication; and this dogma, joined with that of the liberty given to man and with that of Providence which grants this liberty, becomes as the point of conjunction of those dogmas which explain the special order and agreement in which all things human were placed, with those other