Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/300

respects impossible-but it thereby acquires a new and extraordinary power, an expiatory and purifying virtue. This virtue always preserves its indestructible identity, and when it combines in a supernatural manner with a voluntary acceptance, it produces effects which naturally it is incapable of producing. This sublime and consoling doctrine is alike taught us by God, history, and reason, and it constitutes a dogmatical, historical, and rational truth.

The dogma of the transmission of sin and of penalty, and that of the purifying action of the latter when freely accepted, led us naturally to the examination of the organic laws of humanity, which completely explain all the revolutions and events of history. The assemblage of these laws constitutes human order and constitutes it in such a way that it cannot even be otherwise imagined.

After having given the Catholic solutions respecting these profound and fearful problems, among which some relate to the universal order, and others to the human order, we have also presented the solutions invented by the liberal school, and by the socialists of modern times, showing on the one hand the sublime harmonies and consonances of the Catholic dogmas, and on the other the extravagant contradictions of the rationalist schools. The radical impotency of reason to find the true solution of these fundamental problems explains the incoherence and contradictions which are observable in the human solutions: and these incoherent contradictions demonstrate in their turn how absolutely impossible it is for man, when left to himself, to attain those serene and heavenly heights where God has established the secret laws of all things. The result of this investigation, which, as regards the restricted