Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/237

heights. When I examine myself, and reflect upon what I am, and when I behold myself in communion with the first man and with the last of men, and when I consider the actions I perform and see them survive me, and become the cause in the course of their perpetual prolongation of acts multiplied upon acts, which, in their turn, are perpetually multiplied, even to the end of time; when I think that all these actions combined have in my act their origin, and that they will testify in my regard not only for what I do, but for what I have caused others to do, and that I shall accordingly be judged worthy either of reward or condemnation; when I meditate upon all these things, I can only prostrate myself before God and acknowledge that it is not given to me to understand or to measure the immensity of the dignity with which God has invested me. Who but God could thus raise all things to so elevated and perfectly just a standard? When man wishes to exalt any object, he does so only by depressing what he does not elevate. In religious spheres, he does not know how to raise himself without lowering God, nor does he know how to exalt God without debasing himself. In the political world, man does not know how to render homage to liberty without depriving authority of the respect and obedience due to it. In social life, he alternately either sacrifices society to the individual or the individual to society, forever fluctuating, as we have seen, between the communist despotism and Proudhonian anarchy. If he at times attempts to maintain a just equipoise everywhere by establishing a certain accord and justice in things, then the balance with which he would adjust them falls from his hand and is broken,