Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/243

religious order, by denying the doctrine of the hereditary transmission of sin and penalty, which is the exclusive foundation of this dogma; and it denies it in the political order, by proclaiming maxims subversive of the doctrine of the solidarity of nations. Among these maxims that one requires a special notice which declares the principle of non-intervention, and also that other, which is its correlative, and according to which each person ought only to attend to his own affairs, and no one ought to concern himself about the affairs of his neighbor. These maxims are identical, and are only the pure expression of pagan egotism, without the ani- mosity of its malevolence. A people formed by the enervating doctrines of this school will hold no sympathies in common with other nations; and if they do not consider all other nations as their enemies, it is because they have not the energy to do so. The rationalist liberal schools deny the solidarity of the family; they proclaim the principle of the legitimate qualification of all men for all public offices and for all state preferments; and in doing this, they deny the action of ancestors upon their descendants, and the communication of the qualities of the first to the second by hereditary transmission. But while they deny this trans- mission, they at the same time recognize it in two different ways: first, by proclaiming the perpetual identity of nations; and secondly, by proclaiming the principle of an hereditary monarchy. The principle of national identity either signifies nothing, or it means that there is a community of merits and demerits, of glories and disasters, of talents and adaptations, between past and present generations, between the present and the future; and this same community is altogether inexplicable, un-