"Liberalism and Socialism," Brownson's Quarterly Review for 1855

We have brought these two works together because, though published at distant intervals, and differing almost as widely as it is possible to conceive, they are on the subject treated the two profoundest works to be found in the whole range of modern literature.  Both treat the same subject, Donoso Cortes from the point of view of Catholicity, Pierre Leroux from the pantheistic or humanitarian point of view, and each needs to be read and studied by whoever would understand, either in their truth or in their falsity, the Liberalism and Socialism which have made so much noise and stirred up so many commotions throughout the civilized world during the last fifteen or twenty years.

Pierre Leroux has hardly been heard of since 1850.  Whether he is still living or not is more than we know; but we remember the time when he was one of the great men of France, and the representative of an important school in philosophy and politics.  He belonged originally, we believe, to the Saint-Simonian school or sect, and distinguished himself at a later day as a most bitter enemy of the French eclecticism founded by the eloquent and erudite Cousin.  He is decidedly the great man of the modern socialistic school, and the only one with whom we are acquainted who has succeeded in giving it anything like a philosophic basis.  He possesses rare philosophical genius, and, though not the soundest, he is the greatest metaphysician that France has produced in modern times, and may as to his genius and erudition take rank with the late Vincenzo Gioberti, who has had no equal since Leibnitz, for we cannot rank very high such men as Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.  Immanuel Kant is the only distinguished German metaphysician in recent times that we should be willing to name, unless one or two Catholics of Germany are to be excepted.

It may be that we attach an undue importance to the writings of Pierre Leroux, because our acquaintance with them marks an epoch in our mental development, and we owe to them more than to those of any other modern writer.  They revolutionized our own mind both in regard to philosophy and religion, and by the grace of God became the occasion of our conversion to Catholicism.  But we must be permitted to say, that, though his system as a system does not and never did satisfy us, it contains certain great cosmic and metaphysical truths, more distinctly recognized and more clearly and energetically stated than we find even in the ordinary works on theology, and almost wholly wanting in our ordinary systems of philosophy.  His grand error is in his having misinterpreted and misapplied the Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation, in confounding the two natures in the one person of our Lord, and in failing to distinguish properly between the natural and the supernatural orders.  He starts with the Eutychian heresy, or the confusion of the human and the divine, and really, though perhaps unconsciously, explains the Divine by the human, and thus reduces Christianity to pure Humanism or Naturalism.  The Catholic theologian understands at once the reach of this fundamental error, which vitiates and must vitiate the author’s whole system.  But, after all, there is a human side of truth, for man in made in the image and after the similitude of God.  God is, in the language of St. Thomas, similitudo rerum omnium, and hence in all nature there is and must be a certain reflection, so to speak, of the Divinity.  God is in some sense mirrored by his works.  In man and nature we must find, not the elements of Christianity indeed, for they are superhuman and supernatural, but certain analogies or correspondences, which in human language are expressed by the same terms, and through which the Christian mysteries are rendered in a measure intelligible to us.  Leroux certainly confounds these analogies or correspondences in the natural and human order with the superhuman and supernatural dogmas of Christianity; but he certainly has studied them profoundly, and tells us, not unmixed with error, some great and important natural truths,- truths recognized and accepted, indeed, by all the great scholastic divines, but which these divines do not set forth in that distinct and prominent light in which we find them in the earlier Fathers, or in which it is necessary, perhaps, to set them forth in order to meet the characteristic errors of our age.

The Marquis of Valdegamas has studied the same subject with equal mental strength and acuteness, and with a higher order of genius.  He understands it far better, and treats it far more profoundly; for he knows and accepts Catholic theology, which places him in the position to comprehend the natural truth in its true relations with the supernatural, and prevents him from giving a mutilated or distorted view of either.  But he writes mainly for the Catholic mind, and is more intent on showing the errors, absurdities, and fatal tendencies of humanitarian or pantheistic socialism to the understanding of the faithful, than he is on distinguishing for the benefit of its adherents the grain of truth in their system, and using it to lead them up to the Catholic doctrine which accepts and completes it.  Nothing in the world can be better than his book to guard the faithful against the errors of pantheistic or humanitarian Socialism, or to inspire them with a hearty love of Catholic doctrine and morals; but it is not precisely adapted to the wants of the Socialists themselves.  Ignorant of Catholic faith and theology, they will not always be able to find in his Catholicity the truth they are groping after, and which gives to their speculations a value in their own eyes.  We, who happen to know both sides of our own experience, can see that he accepts and vindicates in its true light and place what they really value, and which they erroneously conclude cannot be held in the Church, and persuade themselves can be realized without her, and must be, if realized at all.

The   noble Marquis also takes M. Proudhon as the best representative of Socialism, and confines himself mainly to the refutation of the Proudhonian theory.  Here we must be permitted to differ from him.  If we would study the socialistic contradictions and negations, Proudhon is our man; but if we would study Socialism in its affirmations, in what it has that is positive, in its truths, or half-truths, we must, we think, take Leroux.  Proudhon is by turns a deist and an atheist, a pantheist and a Manichaean, but generally a denier, whose business is to break with the whole past, to reject all that has hitherto been regarded as sacred, in a word, to destroy all that has been or is.  Would we know whither all false theories, religious, political, and social, lead, we must study Proudhon, who under this point of view is the great man of the Socialistic and revolutionary world.  But Leroux has some religious instincts, is not the veritable Apollyon, and attempts to give the positive or affirmative side of Socialism.  If we would know the truth which misleads the Socialists, which they misapprehend and misapply, but which nevertheless is the element which commends to their own judgments and hearts their Socialism, Leroux, not Proudhon, in our judgment, is the great, “the representative man.”

We say this not to depreciate the work of the lamented Spanish nobleman.  We have heretofore expressed our opinion of his remarkable essay, than which, we are assured by those more competent than we are to judge, there is nothing more eloquent in the noble Castilian tongue.  We are not, we confess, of his political school.  We have more confidence in constitutionalism or  parliamentary government than he appears to have had.  We hold that parliamentary or constitutional government, though by no means perfect, though not all we could wish, and far enough from being all that its partisans pretend, affords the only political guarantee of liberty, civil or religious, which, after so many social changes and revolutions, is now practicable.  Certainly it is to it, not to absolute monarchy, that Catholicity owes the immense progress it has made in Europe during the last fifty years.  We have seen nothing in the revolutionary developments during late years to shake our early faith in representative and parliamentary government, and we are satisfied that the Spanish stateman rendered no service to his country by his war against constitutionalism and parliamentary discussion.  The great error of the European liberals is not, in our judgment, so much political as religious.  We find no fault with them for seeking what are called checks and balances, or attempting to found government on compromises; for government is a practical affair, and cannot be carried on without an adjustment of opposing interests, which more or less offend theoretic unity.  We censure them not for this, but for supposing that these compromises, these balancings of principles and interests, and playing off of one against another, can alone suffice for the maintenance of authority on the one hand and individual freedom on the other.  We accept them as far as they go, but we expect no valuable results from them when substituted for religion, or even when intended to operate without it.  We do not, therefore, agree with the illustrious author, whose loss the Catholic world justly deplores, in his anti-parliamentary politics and monarchical theory.

But aside from his politics, in which he was more Spanish than American, we have had in modern times no Catholic writer more free and bold in his speculations, more original and brilliant in his genius, more comprehensive in his thought or spirit-stirring in his eloquence, or in general more remarkable for his depth and soundness.  He formed himself by the study of Holy Scriptures and the great Fathers, rather than the modern theological compendiums, or the great scholastic doctors; and while for that reason he speculates more freely, and writes with more freshness and vigor, he is less exact in his doctrine and less accurate in his language.  There are expressions in his Essay, which, if detached from connection and understood without reference to the obvious intention of the author, and certainly inexact, and perhaps even heretical, as has been shown by the Abbe Gaduel; but if fairly and honestly interpreted by their context and the general scope of the argument, by a liberal-hearted criticism which seeks to unfold the large and comprehensive thoughts of a writer rather than to display its own microscopic accuracy, no very grave objections under the point of view of Catholic doctrine can be sustained against the book.  In this Essay the author has attempted and executed a work that was much needed in the present time, that of carrying back the faithful to the deepest and most living mysteries of the Catholic faith, and showing the origin and support of human society in God.  Starting with the principle already asserted, that God is similitudo rerum omnium, or the likeness which all created things copy, and therefore that all things have their ideas or archetypes in his Divine essence, he shows that true human society has its origin in the Divine society of the Ever-adorable Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, three persons in one nature or essence.  I this Divine society, whose characteristic, as he not very accurately expresses it, is unity in diversity and diversity in unity, he finds the original type of all society, and therefore all true human society must reflect this Divine society, as all creation reflects the Creator.  Here is the fundamental conception, the leading thought, of the Essay on Catholicity, Liberalism, and Socialism.  This thought, which is profoundly Catholic, as well as profoundly philosophic, reproduces what is deepest and truest in the Platonic philosophy, although it is perhaps foreign to the Aristotelian.  We find it in the Holy Scriptures, we find it in the early Fathers, we find it in Catholic theology of all times, but we do not find it always in what passes for philosophy in the schools.  The Platonic philosophy is no doubt exposed to dangers from which the Aristotelean is free.  It is less rigid in its method; it is more daring in its scope, and opens a wider and richer field to speculation.  It gives more play to our emotions, affections, and imagination, and therefore exposes us to greater mental aberrations.  It brings into play the mystic elements of our nature, and opens us on that side on which Satan can best approach and seduce us.  But there can really be no question that it is far profounder than the Aristotelean philosophy, and penetrates to an order of ideas to which Aristotle was a stranger, and which cannot be brought within the comprehension of a rigid Peripateticism.   Peripateticism, considering everything under the form of abstract thought, loses sight of life, of the real living universe, and therefore is unable to detect in the natural order the analogies, resemblances, copies, or reflections, without which this supernatural would be in every sense inapprehensible to our intelligence.   Hence it never enables us to connect the intelligible and the superintelligble, and embrace the natural and the supernatural as one harmonious whole,  having its unity in the Divine essence.  Donoso Cortes has done a noble service to religion and society be reviving, what was almost lost sight of in popular philosophy, the profound thought of the Fathers and the great scholastic doctors, and showing us that even the natural order demands its complement from the supernatural, and that the profoundest mysteries of our faith are the source of all that is true and good, sound and healthy, in our natural life, or, in other words, that the natural has its root in the supernatural, and derives its sap from an order deeper and higher than itself. 

He thus connects human society with the Mystery of the Trinity, which it its norma or type.  As all in Catholicity has its origin in the Mystery of the Trinity, so all true human society must have its origin and type in Catholicity.  This thought reaches far, and must be fully recognized and well understood before we fully comprehend Christian society, and are able to oppose it successfully to the refutation of humanitarian or pantheistic Socialism, so rife in our times.  Those who seek to do this must study profoundly the Essay of Donoso Cortes.

    But our purpose at present is not precisely that of the illustrious Spaniard.  We have already discussed in our pages the errors and dangerous tendencies of Liberalism and Socialism; we have pointed out what they have that is opposed to Catholic faith and theology.  We wish now to draw attention to what they have that is true.  All systems, however erroneous or false, as we have intimated in the foregoing article, have an element of truth, because the human intellect, being created in the image of the Divine, and made for the apprehension of truth, can never operate with pure falsehood.  To rightly comprehend a system is not simply to detect its errors.  We understand not even an erroneous system till we understand its truth; and its real refutation lies not so much in detecting and exposing its fallacies, as in detecting, distinguishing, and accepting the truth which it misapprehends, misinterprets, or misapplies.  Socialism commends itself to the intellect of its adherents only in the respect that it is true, and to their hearts only in the respect that it is good; for the intellect, St. Thomas teaches, can never be false, nor the will will evil.  Both falsehood and evil are privative, neither is positive.  Error is in the defect of truth, and evil in the defect of good.  We must say this or assert falsehood as a real entity and evil as a positive principle, and thus fall into Manichaeism.  We must beware of the Calvinistic doctrine of total depravity, or total corruption by the fall of human nature.  If man cannot embrace pure falsehood nor will what under some aspect is not good, it follows that in every erroneous or mischievous system there is and must be an aspect of truth and goodness, and it is only under this aspect that the system is dear to its adherents.  If we wish to produce a favorable effect on them, and to refute their system for their sake, we must begin, not by denouncing their error, but by showing them that we recognize and accept their truth.

Our own views of both Liberalism and Socialism have so often been expressed in these pages, that none of our readers can suspect us of any undue bias in their favor.  We have, as it is well known, no sympathy with them or the movements they have inspired. No one has denounced them in stronger terms, or more strenuously opposed them.  But our pages bear ample evidence that we have never denied, or pretended to deny, that each has something true and good in its order.  We are not unfrequently accused of being one-sided, narrow-minded, and disposed always to push the principle we may happen to adopt to extremes.  Nothing is more untrue.  An opposite charge might with far more propriety be brought against us.  IN our war against the Red Republicanism of Europe, we were never known to push our defense of order and authority so far as to express an opinion favorable to absolute monarchy, or to deny the natural equality of all men.  We have always made it a point, in combating erroneous or mischievous systems, to recognize that fact that they contain something that we should be sorry to combat, and if we are or have been to a certain extent unpopular with our countrymen, it is precisely because we have never shown ourselves exclusive.  But when erroneous systems are in arms or arming themselves against society, we do not think it the proper time to draw attention to their side of the truth and goodness, for it is then a more urgent duty to defeat them, and save society from the ruin they threaten, than it is to labor to convert their adherents from their errors.  One course is proper when conversion is the end to be sought, another is proper when it is necessary to guard people against falling into error.  To have dwelt in 1848 on what there is in Liberalism and Socialism that may be accepted, would have tended to give the people a false direction.  We could not then stop to analyze and distinguish.  An imperious duty made it necessary to expose the dangerous errors and tendencies of the revolutionary systems and movements.  But in 1855, when the danger comes from the opposite quarter, we are free to labor for the conversion of those whom these false systems have misled, by distinguishing and accepting the truth or half-truth which they misapprehend and misapply.  There is a time for all things, and our motto should be, Everything in its time.

The Liberals and Socialists are not true Christians, but it would be unjust to deny that there are individuals among them who have generous, noble, and even spiritual aspirations, which Christianity teaches us to accept and respect.  Much at least of what is most living, least groveling, least servile, most manly, and most elevated, outside of the Church, is found today in their ranks.  We are never to judge individual members of political and social parties by their mere doctrinal formulas, for men’s heads and hearts are often far apart, and sometimes strongly opposed one to the other.  Liberals and Socialists are to be judged, under the point of view we wish now to consider them, not solely nor chiefly by their abstract doctrines,   but by their sentiments, their cravings, affections, and aspirations.  Liberalism and Socialism, like all false systems, end at last in pure Gentilism, and yet in their modern form they could have originated only in a community which had once been Christian, and which still retained a tradition of the Chrisitan doctrine of love.  They originate in philanthropy, the love of mankind, the form, and the only form, which what is purest and best in religion can assume outside the Christian Church.

We condemn as heartily as any man the Liberal and Socialistic revolutions of Europe during the last sixty or seventy years, but we cannot deny that those revolutions have to some extent had a philanthropic origin, and have all been prosecuted with the intention of doing for this world by the state through philanthropy what the Church has done or shown she can do through Christian charity.  All these movements to popularize government, to mitigate penal codes, to redress political and social grievances, and to elevate the poorer and more numerous classes, although for the most part failing in their object, have originated in benevolent sentiment, though perverted to base, selfish purposes by their chief managers.  In their writings at least, in their speculations, the philosophers of the last century overflowed with generous sentiments, and if they attacked old systems, and demanded radical changes in social or religious institutions, in laws, manners, and customs, it was always in the name of virtue, and always for the purpose of realizing, as they pretended, often believed, something better for the nation or the race. No small number of the friends and supporters of the old French Revolution were moved by a warm and diffusive benevolence; and we envy not the man who can see nothing not bad in the generous enthusiasm of a very considerable portion of the French people in the early days of that revolution.  The state of things which obtained in France prior to the Revolution was not so bad as that which the Revolution itself noticed, but it was such as no man of a sound mind and an honest heart can approve.  The evils may have been exaggerated, but no one can deny that they were great and deplorable.  The court and upper classes were corrupt either in their principles or their manners, and the great body of the people were oppressed with burdens too heavy to be borne, and looked upon as born only to minister to the wants and pleasures of the idle and luxurious few.  How could men who have the hearts of men be otherwise than indignant, when people were sent to the Bastile for venturing to attack the king’s lackey of the king’s mistress,- when the king abandoned himself to the most debasing and criminal sensuality, and a painted harlot, a Pompadour or a Dubarry, was virtually the fist minister of state, and dispensed the favors or determined the appointments of the crown, while the toiling multitude were overloaded with taxes, reduced to penury, to absolute destitution, and received in answer to their petition for bread “a new gallows forty feet high”?  Revolutions are serious things, and no people can be stirred up to make a social revolution against all that they have been accustomed to hold sacred, till they feel the pressure of want, and see gaunt famine staring them in the face.  Nations, humanity at large, must bare some traces of that Divine similitude which all things more or less faithfully copy, and can no more act without some aspect of truth or shadow of good than individuals; and though it may be generally more in accordance with the fact to say, Vox populi, vox diaboli, than Vox populi, vox Dei, yet there is a sense in which it will not do to deny that “the voice of the people is the voice of God.”  The old French Revolution found at least a pretext in the vices of the court, in the corruption of the noblesse, in the dissoluteness of a portion of the clergy, and in the general neglect and the distress of the people.  And things were not much worse in France than in other European countries at the same time, if indeed they were so bad.  It were idle to deny the existence of the evils, or to hold it to have been criminal, or otherwise than praiseworthy, to attempt to redress them.  It was a sacred duty, imposed alike by charity and philanthropy, to undertake their removal, though of course not by unlawful means, certainly not by revolution, which could only make matters worse.

Of course we have no confidence even in philanthropy, when acting alone, to effect any good, for it seldom fails to make matters worse; but we have very little sympathy with the ordinary shallow and selfish declamation of conservatives against the modern revolutionary movements.  The only conservatism we can respect is that which frankly acknowledges the wrong, and seeks by proper means to redress it wherever it finds it.  It is, after all, less against revolutions that we would direct the virtuous indignation of our conservative friends, now that the reaction has become strong, than against the misgovernment, the tyranny, the vices and the crimes, the heartlessness, the cruelty, the neglect of the poor by those who should love and succor them, or the wrongs inflicted on them, which provoke revolutions, and give Satan an opportunity to possess the multitude, and pervert their purest sentiments and their most generous enthusiasm to evil.  Revolution was no fitting remedy for the evils which the system of secular government, attained to its full growth in Louis the Fourteenth, had generated.  It was the remedy of madness or wild despair.  But the evils had grown beyond all reasonable endurance.  They outraged alike natural benevolence and Christian charity.  Let not the friends of religion and order have censures only for those who sought madly to remove them by revolutions, and none for those whose vices and crimes caused them, lest they render religion and order odious to all men and human hearts.

Philanthropy is a human sentiment, and by no means Christian charity.  We know it perfectly well.  But it corresponds to charity as the human corresponds to the Divine, copies it as nature copies or imitates God, and we never need persuade ourselves that what is repugnant to it is pleasing to charity.  Gratia supponit naturam.  How often must we repeat, that grace does not supersede nature?  St. Ignatius Loyola did not seek to destroy the natural ambition of young Francis Xavier; he accepted it, and sought simply to direct it from earthly to heavenly glory.  No wise master of spiritual life ever seeks to root out nature; his aim is always to accept it, and direct it in right paths towards God, the true end of man.  Calvin and Jansenius, those subtle enemies of Christ, have done more injury to religion, a thousand times over, than Voltaire and Rousseau, for they placed nature and grace in opposition, and denied nature in order to assert grace.  Not enough have been appreciated the services rendered to religion and humanity by the sons of Loyola, in combating as they did, in the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, the degrading and demoralizing, though specious, heresy of the Jansenists.  Nobly did they defend the freedom, the dignity, and the glorious destiny of human nature.  The famous Maxims of Rochefoucauld, once so celebrated, were Jansenistic, not Catholic, and were conceived in the spirit of Port Royal, not of the Church.  They could have been inspired only by a heresy that places grace in opposition to nature, and thinks to exalt the one by degrading and annihilating the other.  The Catholic honors nature, and asserts for it a more glorious destiny than do they who madly assert that man in his developments may grow into God.  No, we repeat it, God is the similitude of all things, and the human has its type, its exemplar, in the Divine.  The Divine is mirrored, reflected, by the human; grace, therefore, by nature.  The natural sentiments of the human heart are below the infused graces of the Christian, but they are not opposed to them.  Philanthropy, or the natural benevolence of the human heart, cannot rise to the elevation and power of Christian charity, or aspire to its eternal reward; but charity no more opposes it, and can no more dispense with it, than revelation opposes or can dispense with reason.  What is opposed to benevolence is even more opposed to Christian charity.  It is a great mistake to suppose that simple human benevolence or philanthropy is sufficient of itself to redress either social or individual grievances; but it is a still greater mistake therefore to condemn it, to neglect it, to make no efforts to redress the grievances, or to deny them to be real grievances, because they can be effectually redressed only by benevolence exalted to Christian charity.  Not all the works of infidels are sin.  Works of humanity, of genuine human benevolence, which are not always wanting in non-Catholic society, cannot indeed merit eternal life, or even the grace of conversion, for gratia est omnino gratis;  but they are not sinful; they are good in the natural order, and merit and shall receive in that order their reward.  The men of our times, who have lost the sense of Christian charity and seek to substitute philanthropy for it, do yet honor that charity in its pale and evanescent human reflex, and so far have just sentiments, and are unchristian rather than antichristian. 

The doctrine of equal rights, so energetically asserted, a few years since, by “the Workingmen’s party,” insisted on under one of its aspects by Abolitionists, and by the democratic party throughout the world, is not all false nor all antichristian, and after all faintly mirrors the Chrisitan doctrine of the unity and solidarity of the race.  There is truth in the Jacobinical doctrine of “fraternity,” and in Kossuth’s doctrine of “solidarity of the peoples.”  The workingmen’s party is dead now, and buried in other parties which have absorbed it, but it had a great truth for its basis.  It asserted the natural nobility of all men, the nobility of human nature itself, as worthy of our reverence in the humble artisan or laborer as in the titled noble.

“The king can make a belted knight,

A marquis, duke, and a’ that;

An honest man’s aboon his might,

Guid faith! He maunna fa’ that.”

There is something that it will not do to sneer at in that free and noble spirit that seeks to break down the artificial barriers which separate man from man and nation from nation, and melt all into one grand brotherhood.  If there is any one thing certain, it is that the Church has always asserted the unity of the race, and the natural equality of all men.  Man equals man the world over, and hence, as Pope St. Gregory the First teaches, man, though he has received the dominion over the lower creation, has not received dominion over man, and princes are required to govern as pastors, not as lords; for since all men are equal by nature, the governed are as men the equals and brothers of the governors.

We are a little surprised to find the historian of the united States, in his earlier volumes, disposed to regard Calvin as in some sense the champion of equal rights, and to give Calvinism credit for the principle of political equality on which our American institutions are based, for his own doctrine is as repugnant to the Calvinistic, as light is to darkness.  Calvinism asserts only a negative equality.  It reduces all to a common level, we grant, by asserting the total depravity of nature, and therefore the nullity of nature in all men; but this is the equality of death, not of life.  All are equal, because all are nothing.  But it does not elevate all to a common level by the assertion by the assertion of a positive equality, an equality founded on what all men are and have by nature.  Moreover, Calvinism is unfavorable, nay, decidedly hostile to that doctrine of equality which Mr. Bancroft so strenuously maintains.  By its doctrine of the nullity of nature and particular election and reprobation, whereby only a certain definite number can be elevated by grace, it founds an aristocracy, the aristocracy of the saints, or the elect.  Asserting the moral nullity of nature, it necessarily founds the political order on grace, as it did in Geneva and the early Colony of Massachusetts, and excludes from all political rights all whom it does not count among the saints.  Maintaining the total depravity of nature, it must deny to nature all rights, and can assert rights only for those who are assumed to be in grace; and hence only the saints have or can have the rights to govern,- one of the heresies of Wiclef, condemned by the Council of Constance.  Nature being null, there can be no rights under the law of nature, and if no rights, no possessions.  Consequently, they who are counted among the non-elect have nothing which the elect are bound to hold sacred and inviolable.  They are at the mercy of the saints, who may at pleasure despoil them of all they call their own, and take possession of their political and civil powers, their houses and lands, their goods and chattels, their wives and children, and even their very persons.  Logically and consistently carried out, Calvinism therefore founds, not monarchy indeed, but the aristocracy of the saints, that is, of Calvinists, the most absolute and the most odious aristocracy that it is possible to conceive.   

Undoubtedly the regenerate, those who are in grace, alone have rights in regard to eternal salvation, for certainly no man can have a natural right to supernatural beatitude.  We are saved not by our natural merits, or merits under the law of nature, but by grace merited for us by Christ our head.  The error of the Calvinist does not lie in founding our titles to eternal life on grace and grace alone, but consists in denying the natural law, that man retains all his original order all men have equal rights, which even the elect or those elevated by grace must respect as sacred and inviolable.  God in promulgating the law of grace does in no respect abrogate the law of nature, nor in the least modify the rights or obligations of men under that law.  Hence the Apostle recognizes the legitimacy of the temporal power of his time, and bids the faithful to obey for conscience’ sake the Roman Emperor, though a pagan, in all things temporal.  Hence the Church recognizes and always has recognized the rights of infidel and even heretical princes to the temporal obedience of their subjects, even when those subjects are Catholics, who can be absolved from their allegiance only in case their princes forfeit their rights by the law under which they hold.   Hence the Church forbids infidels, Jews, or persons who have not come under her spiritual jurisdiction, to be forced to accept the faith.  Hence, too, she recognizes the natural rights of life, liberty, and property as fully in infidels and heretics as in the faithful themselves.  Here is the grand difference between a positive and a negative natural equality, between the natural equality asserted by Catholicity and that favored by Calvinism.  Calvinism asserts the natural equality of all men, by denying alike to all men all natural rights, assuming all rights to have been forfeited by the fall; Catholicity asserts the natural equality of all men , by asserting that all have equal natural rights, and denies that any natural rights we forfeited or lost by the transgression of our first parents.   The rights lost by the Fall were supernatural, not natural rights,- rights held under the law of grace, not rights held under the law of nature; for it was by grace, not nature, that man was placed prior to the Fall on the plane of his supernatural destiny.  Hence Catholicity recognizes in nature something sacred and inviolable, which even the Church must respect.  Hence Catholicity must always respect the natural liberty of man, and can no more tyrannize over the infidel than over the believer,- must, in fact, as to the natural order, place both on the same footing of equality.  Calvinism begins by denying all natural human rights, nullifying nature, and therefore all natural liberty, and asserts rights for the elect only.  Hence it is free from all obligation to the non-elect, that is, to those who are not Calvinists, and is at liberty to play the tyrant over them at pleasure.

This is not mere speculation, or a simple logical conclusion from the Calvinistic premises.  It is a conclusion practically drawn by Calvinists themselves, and written out in the blood of non-Calvinists, wherever they have had the power.  Never have Calvinists held sacred any liberty except liberty for Calvinists.  You may verify the fact by the history of Calvinism in Geneva, by that of the Puritans in England, that of the Covenanters in Scotland, and that of our own Puritan ancestors.  Liberty for the elect, but no liberty for the non-elect, is the Calvinistic motto.  To the saints belong the earth.  Do you not see this in the Know-Nothing movement against Catholics in our own country?  Unbelievers, Unitarians, Universalists, and non-Evangelical sects, may engage in that movement, but its informing and controlling spirit is that of Calvinism, just now galvanized, as we have elsewhere said, into a sort of spasmodic life.  Its very language betrays it.  It professes religious liberty, and its very aim is to deny it to Catholics, who in its view, we suppose, are reprobates.

We may see here, again, the title of the Jesuits, as true Catholics, to the gratitude of mankind, for the noble energy with which they vindicated the rights and dignity of nature against insidious Jansenism, that improved edition of Calvinism.  “Nature,” as someone remarks, “is not good for nothing.”  It is not good for everything, yet it is good for something, and in its place is no more to be denied than grace itself.

That Calvinism has accidentally served the cause of equal rights in this country, we are not disposed to deny.  It led our Calvinistic ancestors to assert equal rights for the elect, that is, for Calvinists, and to make provisions for protecting them. When Calvinism lost its sway, and had become, as it practically had at the time of the Revolution, a dead letter, these provisions were without much difficulty extended and made to protect equal rights not as rights of the elect, but as the rights of man.  We think, if Mr. Bancroft had studied more thoroughly the Calvinistic system, he would have seen that, of all conceivable systems, it is the least favorable to that liberty and equality which he so eloquently and so energetically asserts.  The equality that results from the equal depravity of nature can never be the basis of the equal rights of all men.  To obtain this basis you must assert with the Catholic the inherent freedom, dignity, and nobility of human nature in every man, which requires the assertion of the unity of the race, and the recognition of that great fact, so seldom reflected on, so little understood, and so seldom practically applied, that God made man in his own image and likeness, and therefore man in his very nature must copy, imitate, or mirror his Maker.

The Workingmen were right in asserting the natural equality, or equal natural rights, of all men, and even in asserting the equal natural rights of all men to means and facilities for acquiring; for they did not, as it was alleged, assert the natural right of all men to equal acquisitions.  The inequality they complained of was the unequal condition in which men are artificially placed in regard to acquiring, whether it be riches or honor, power or profit.  Their error was in seeking to remove this inequality by social or political action.  This inequality is, no doubt, in regard to the temporal order, a real grievance; but the difficulty is that it cannot be redressed by society, or if it can, not without striking at the right of property, and thus producing a far greater evil.  There are many things very desirable, very proper to be done, which exceed both the ability and the competency of the state to do.  The state alone is not competent to all the wants of even natural society.  It must protect acquired as well as natural rights, and therefore the right to hold as well as to acquire property; and if it does this, it cannot secure to every man equal means or facilities for acquiring.  It is obligated by its very nature to content itself with maintaining the equal right of all to acquire, and to hold what they acquire; when more is needed, we must look to a power of another order, - the moral power.  The Workingmen committed a mistake analogous to that committed by our ultra-temperance people.  Intemperance is a sin, a vice, which every man ought to avoid, and temperance is a virtue which every man ought to practice. But the state is competent in the case only to leave full freedom to the virtue, and to punish the intemperance only in so far as it deprives someone of his rights.  In that it is a sin or a vice, the state is not competent to deal with it, either by way of prevention or of punishment; it can take cognizance of it only in that it is an injury, or deprives someone of his rights, natural or acquired.  The state cannot punish the simple vice of drunkenness only when it interferes with the rights of others, or disturbs the public peace.  Hence the principle of the Maine Liquor Law is indefensible.  A man has a natural right to drink wine, beer, cider, gin, rum, brandy, or whiskey, if he chooses, and can honestly procure it.  He has a right to use intoxicating drinks so long as he does not abuse them. That right is and must be sacred and inviolable for the state.  The state can have the right to deal only with the abuse.  But the Main Liquor Law proceeds on the principle that the state has the right to guard  against the abuse by prohibiting the use, or by declaring the use itself an abuse.  This, as it assumes for the state the right to alter the moral law or to introduce a ne principle into morals, cannot be admitted, unless we are prepared to assert civil despotism.  The office of the state is not to teach morals, or to interpret the moral law, but to execute it; not to define right, but to protect and vindicate it; To teach morals, to define what is or is not right, is not within the competency of the civil power.  That belongs to the spiritual or moral power, distinct from the civil power, and moving in another orbit.  The equality, if the Workingmen had understood it, which they wanted, they would have sought from love, not law, and by means of the Church, not the state; for the Church alone can introduce equality in the matters of acquired rights, by teaching the doctrine of love, and bringing home to the consciences of rich possessors, that they are stewards, and not absolute proprietors, of their estates, and therefore are to use them for the good of their neighbor, not for their own private good alone, on the principle that each is bound for all and all for each, or that all are members of one body, and members of one another, and that the body cannot suffer without the members, nor a member without the body.  It was on this principle that St. Chrysostom told the rich of Constantinople that they were murderers of the poor who died for the want of the means wherewith to live.  But it would be perfect madness to attempt to carry out this principle by political organization or legislative action.  The right to acquire and to hold property independent of the civil power must be recognized and protected, or the whole community will die of starvation.  The evil which the state must tolerate for the sake of the good, the moral power operating on conscience and love must redress.

The doctrine of the solidarity and communion of the race, which Leroux makes the basis of his socialism and the principle of his explanation of Christianity, has something which, perhaps, a Christian may, and even must, accept.  It may be permitted to refer to our personal experience, we must say that it was through that doctrine, as set forth by Leroux in his work on Humanity, that by the grace of God we were led to the Catholic Church; and we may add, that the same was true of several of our friends, one at least of whom is now a most worthy member of the Catholic priesthood, and one of the most indefatigable and successful Catholic missionaries in the country.  We thought we saw a great and important truth in the doctrine, but also that, as Leroux laid it down, it was incomplete; and if theoretically and practically completed anywhere, it must be accustomed ardor, and, developing it in our own way, found ourselves knocking at the door of the Church, and demanding entrance.  Having been admitted into the Church, and commenced the study of Catholic theology in the scholastic authors, in whom we found nothing which seemed to us a recognition of it, we felt that it was our duty to waive its public consideration till we could have time and opportunity of reexamining it in the light of Catholic faith.  We saw at once that the doctrine pertained to an order of thought far below Catholic dogma, and that we had erred in supposing it to be the explication and expression of the real sense of the Catholic mysteries; but how far it was or was not in harmony with them, we felt unable to say.  It was a problem to be solved, and not by us till we had become somewhat more familiar than we were at the time with Catholic theology.  The form under which we had entertained it was, in regard to scholastic theology, a novelty, and therefore to be suspected.  It might conceal an error, and even a dangerous error.  It was certainly prudent, nay, it was our duty, not to insist on it, and to be content with using the language, arguments, and illustrations which we knew to be safe.  Hence the trains of thought with which we made our readers so familiar during our transitions state, and which had played so important a part in the process of our conversion, were suddenly interrupted the moment we entered the Church and began to write as a Catholic.  They who had watched our course, and taken some interest in our progress from a low form or rationalism to Catholicity, were unable to trace in our writings any continuity of thought between what was published the day before we entered the Church and what we wrote and published the day after.  So abrupt and complete a change seemed to them inexplicable on any rational principles, and was of course ascribed to our fickleness, or to our no longer being suffered to have a mind of our own.  People outside of the Church lost confidence in us, and if they continued to read us at all, it was mainly to amuse themselves with what they were pleased to look upon as our “feats of intellectual gladiatorship.”  This of course had its unpleasantness and its inconveniences, but it was not unendurable.

But we may say now, after more than ten years of silent thought and reflection on the subject, that, though not free from trifling errors, and much exaggerated as to their importance in our own mind, the principles which we learned form Leroux and developed and applied in our own way were substantially true, and we can without lesion to our Catholic resume the train of thought which appeared to be so abruptly terminated on our entering the Church.  The views which we set forth in our Letter to Dr. Channing, in 1842, on the Mediatorial Life of Christ, as far as they went, we can accept now, and not without advantage.  They were not what we thought them, and did not attain, as we supposed, to Catholic doctrine; yet they embraced elements of natural truth which help us in some respects to understand the Catholic dogma, and which the dogma may accept as charity accepts philanthropy.  The basis of the doctrine we set forth in that letter was, that man lives by communion with God, humanity, and nature, and that his life partakes of the qualities of the object with which he communes.  Man cannot live by himself alone, and every fact of life is the resultant of two factors, of the concurrent activity of subject and object, and partakes of the character of each.  The individual can live and act only by virtue of communion with that which is not himself, and which we call his object, because it is set over against him.  This does not mean that he cannot act without some object, or end to which he acts, although that it undoubtedly the case, but without another activity than his own, which meets and concurs with it.  The fact of life results from the intershock of the two activities, and is their joint product.  The subject is living subject, or subject in actu, only by virtue of communion with its object.  Thus it cannot think without the active presence of the intelligible, or love without the active presence of the amiable, which is really only what St. Thomas teaches when he says the intellect is in ordinem ad verum, and the will in ordinem ad bonum; that the intellect is never false, and the will can never will only good.  Therefore we have frequently brought out the doctrine in order to refute the modern psychologists, and those philosophers who would persuade us that it is not the mundus physicus, but an intermediary world, which they call the mundus logicus, that the mind in its perceptions  immediately apprehends.  The mind cannot think without thinking some object, and as to the production of thought, the object must act on or with the subject,- because if purely passive it is as if it were not, for pure passivity is mere potentiality,- the object must be real, being or existence, since what neither is nor exists cannot act or produce any effect.  Consequently, either we perceive nothing and perform no act or perception, or the world perceived is the real world itself, not a merely abstract or logical world, or a mere species or phantasm.

But thought is an effect, and whoever thinks at all produces or generates something.  Every theologian must admit this, or how else can he hold the mystery of the Trinity, and believe in the  only begotten Son of God?  In God, who is actus purissimus, or pure act, as say Aristotle, and the Schoolmen after him, as he is infinite and contains no passivity, he enters with his whole being into his thought, the word generated is and must be exactly his equal, and identical in nature, consubstantial with himself.  But man, not being pure act, nor intelligible in himself, cannot think without another activity that supplies the object necessary to reduce his passivity to act; and as he cannot enter with his whole being into his thought, he cannot, as God, generate the exact image of himself.  Nevertheless, in conjunction with the object, since he imitates in his degree the divine intellect, he generates something, and this something we call a fact of life, or life itself considered as the product of living activity.  Now, since to production or generation of thought or the fact of life subject and object must concur, it is their joint product, and must participate of the character of each.  Here is the basis of what is called the solidarity of the race, under the joint view of intellect.

But man is not pure intellect.  He has a heart as well as a head, and can love as well as think.  What we have asserted of thought is equally true of love, as we learn from the same adorable mystery of the Trintiy.  For the Father, the Unbegotten, loves the Son, the begotten, and from their mutual love proceeds the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Ghost.  Only like can commune with like, and love properly so called can be only of like to like, and therefore under the relation of love man only can be the object of man.  By virtue of the unity of the race every human being is the object of every other human being.  But by the law of all communion of subject and object, the result generated of proceeding is the joint product of the two factors, and therefore the life of any one man is the joint product of him and every other man; and thus is one and the same life for all and for each, and for each and for all.  But as every generation, so to speak, overlaps its successor, and each new generation communes with its predecessor, the solidarity of the race is not only a solidarity of all men in space, but of all men in time, linking together, in one indissoluble life, the first man with the last, and the last man with the first.

Taking this doctrine, but giving a different application from that of Leroux, in order to escape his denial of the personality of God and the personal immortality of the soul, and to be able to assert the Incarnation in the individual man Jesus, instead of the race, we thought we could bridge over the gulf between the Unitarian and the Trinitarian, and accept and explain the Christian Church and Christian mysteries.  In this respect our letter to Dr. Channing fails.  The thought we developed does not rise to the order of Catholic dogma, and at the highest remains in the natural order.   Yet the doctrine is substantially true.  It is not the supernatural truth of Christianity, but it is in some sense the truth of the natural order which corresponds to it, and by which it is made apprehensible to us.  The error of Leroux and ourselves was not in asserting the natural communion and solidarity of the race, but in supposing them to be the real significance of the Chrisitan mysteries, the Incarnation, Holy Communion, the Church, Apostolic Succession, Tradition, etc., or the great truths held by the early Christians, and symbolized by the Catholic dogmas.  The error was in assuming that Catholic dogmas symbolize natural truths; it had been more correct to have said the reverse, that the natural truths symbolize the dogmas, or represent them as the human represents the Divine.  “See that you make all things according to the pattern shown you in the Mount.”  The earthly symbolizes the heavenly, not the heavenly the earthly.  The dogma is not, as Leroux, Cousin, and others have foolishly asserted, the form with which faith, the religious  sentiment, or enthusiasm clothes the natural or philosophic truth.  The natural or philosophic truth, on the contrary, is the symbol of which the dogma is the hidden meaning, the Divine reality, or the Divine likeness which it copies or imitates.

Although the natural communion of the human race does not introduce us to the principle of the Sacraments,  as Leroux and we after him supposed, and although the natural solidarity of the race is infinitely below the Christian solidarity effected by the Sacraments, there is no opposition between one and the other.  We do not by natural communion receive and incorporate into our life that grace which unites us to God and enables us to live the supernatural life of Christ, and the solidarity resulting from it is infinitely below that of the Church, that mystic body of Christ, in which he is as it were continuously incarnated; but it does express the condition of our natural human life, and its assertion, while no disadvantage to the supernatural, is of great advantage to the natural order.  It condemns all exclusiveness, whether individual or national, and asserts the necessity to the full development of our natural life of the free and peaceful intercourse of man with man the world over.  Man has a threefold nature, and lives by communion with God, and nature.  He communes with God in religion, with man in society, and with nature in property, and any political or social order that strikes at either of these, or hinders or obstructs this threefold communion, as Leroux well maintains, is alike repugnant to the will of God and the highest interests of humanity; and efforts made to render this communion free and unobstructed, to give freedom in the acquisition and security in the possession of property, to protect the family as the basis of society, and to break down the barriers to social intercourse interposed by prejudices of birth or caste, and to secure freedom of worship or religion, are in principle great and solemn duties, obligatory alike upon all men.  Thus far the Liberalists and Socialists can make a valid defense.  The end proposed is just and obligatory.  The means they adopt of course we do and must condemn.  Philanthropy enjoins what they would effect, and Philanthropy here may justify herself by the natural solidarity of the race.

Kossuth, when he was here, had much to say of “the solidarity of the peoples,” from which he concluded the right of the people of every country, irrespective of their government, to run to the assistance of any particular people struggling for its rights.  This solidarity of peoples rests on the doctrine of the solidarity of the race.  Man lives his social life only by communion with man, and every man becomes every man’s object, and all are bound together in the unity of one indissoluble life.  Man then can never be indifferent to man; never have the right to ask, with Cain, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”  Your brother is your object, without which you cannot live the life of love.  He is your other self, the objective side of your own life.  If this may be said of individuals, why not of nations?  There is in some sense a solidarity of nations, as well as of individuals.  The right of the people without the permission of their government to assist a sister people, we cannot absolutely deny.  The race is more than the individual, and humanity more than the nation.  There is a great and glorious truth in Senator Seward’s doctrine of the Higher Law, a truth which every true man will assert, if need be, in exile or the dungeon, on the scaffold or at the stake.  I am a man before I am a citizen, and my rights as a man can never be subordinated to my duties as a citizen.  Even the Church recognizes and vindicates my rights as a man, and the Church is higher in the order of God’s providence than the state, as much so as grace is higher than nature.  There are cases in which the state cannot bind the citizen, as the Apostles taught us when they refused to obey the magistrates who commanded them to preach no more in the name of Jesus of Nazareth.  We are to love our neighbor as ourself; for in one sense our neighbor is ourself; since he is our object, without which we cannot love or live; there are cases when we must rush to his assistance, at least when we may rush to his assistance, at the hazard of life.  There may then be cases when the solidarity of the race overrides the solidarity of the nation, and permits a people without the national sanction to rush to the assistance of another people struggling against tyranny for its liberty and independence; but not indeed at the call of every discomfited demagogue.  The principle we hold to be true, but it can be of only rare application.  The struggling people must have a cause manifestly just, and have adopted means manifestly unexceptionable, and the national permission must have been wrongly withheld, before the people of another nation have the right to interfere; and these things must be determined not by private judgment or caprice, but by an authority competent to decide in the case, otherwise an attack may be made against legitimate authority, and a blow be struck at order, which is as sacred as liberty.

We might pursue this subject further, but it is unnecessary at present.  We have thus far been intent mainly on pointing out what a Catholic may accept as true and good in modern Liberalism and Socialism.  What they want, we mean when sincere, earnest, and disinterested, what they are driving at, under certain aspects, is good, and in its place approved alike by charity and philanthropy.  We cannot utterly condemn all we did and said as a Liberalist or as a Socialist, and we find much in Liberalists and Socialists of the present day to approve.  When they are not completely beside themselves, we admit that most of the things they call political and social grievances are grievances, and such as ought to be redressed.  But with what they contend for that is true and good, they couple great and dangerous errors.  They err, above all, as to the means by which they seek to gain their ends.  In what they for the most part aim at, we can agree with them.  We love liberty as much as they do, we are as indignant at wrong as they are; but we see them trying to effect by the state what can be effected only by the Church, and by the natural sentiment of philanthropy what is practicable only by the sentiment of philanthropy what is practicable only by the supernatural virtue of charity.

Every age has its own characteristics, and we must address its dominant sentiment, whether we would serve or disserve it.  Our age is philanthropical rather than intellectual.  It has lost faith intellectually, but retains a faint echo of it on the side of the affections.  It does not think so much as it feels, and it demands the Gospel of Love with far more earnestness and energy than it does the Gospel of Truth.  Charity had exalted and intensified its affections.  Despoiled of charity, it is devoured by its benevolent sentiments.  It would do good, it would devote itself to the poor, the enslaved, the neglected, the downtrodden.  It would bind up the broken heart, and bring rest to the suffering.  These are not bad traits, and we love to dwell on the disinterestedness of the Howards, the Frys, the Nightingales, and the benevolent men and women in our own country who so unreservedly devote themselves to the relief of the afflicted.  These prove what the age craves, and what it is looking for.  Through its benevolence Satan no doubt often misleads it, but through the same benevolence the missionary of the cross may approach it and lead it up to God.

We have wished, in these times, when the Church is assailed to violently by the galvanized Calvinism manifesting itself in Know-Nothing movements, to show, by exhibiting the manner in which she regards those movements which spring from natural benevolence or a generous regard for human well-being, that she no more deserves than she fears their violence.  What is true and good in the natural order manifested by those outside, though imperfect, she accepts.  We have wished, also, in a practical way, to reply to those who are perpetually accusing us of being narrow and exclusive, and a renegade from free principles.  What we aimed at before our conversion is still dear to us, and we are still in some sense a man of our age.  But having indicated the good side of Liberalism and Socialism, we shall take a future opportunity to show more fully that it is accepted by the Church, and is completed only in and through her communion.