Paul refrained
from finishing the disgusting catalogue of its awful sins and vices. The
church, Christianity, could save _man_, but it could not save the
_empire_. The principle of social harmony being lost, government and
society fell to pieces.
On a certain memorable occasion, the present Emperor of France uttered
the mystic phrase: _The empire is peace!_ So it is. But how? I answer:
Several centuries of Godless French statesmanship--engineered by men
who, though nominal Christians or Catholics, discarded God in affairs of
state, and attempted to rule without God in the world, except to use Him
(pardon the expression) as a sort of scarecrow for the 'lower
orders'--resulted in gradually drying up those intermediary institutions
which had served at once to develop a manly civic life and to protect
private liberty, and in reabsorbing and concentrating all power in the
central government. Even in the early part of these centuries, Louis the
Fourteenth made his boast, 'I am the state,' and thereby announced the
substantial reinauguration of pagan imperialism or absolutism. His
successors, aided by the ever-growing influence of the renaissance,
which was but the revivification of classic paganism, continued his
system, and when at last their cruel, inhuman, and unchristian
oppressions drove men to the assertion of their rights in the fierce
whirlwind of the French Revolution, that very assertion, 'clad in hell
fire,' as Carlyle says, was based on the self-same fundamental principle
that 'man is his own end.
Pages:
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98