' It is the strong iron band around a mass
of antagonistic atoms, which have lost, at least in the sphere of
politics, the cohesive principle of harmony: union with each other by
virtue of union with the God-man.
Through all the terrific scenes of turbulence and carnage, the frequent
dynastic changes, and the fearful scourgings of the French empire since
the days of Louis the Fourteenth, the nation itself has not been
destroyed, because, after all, there was and is a vast deal of virtue in
the people as individuals. God never destroyed a nation for its public
or national sins until the people themselves had become individually
thoroughly corrupt. The city of Sodom itself would have been spared had
even _five_ good men been found therein. And so the French nation does
not go to pieces, as the Roman empire did, because, notwithstanding the
vice of Paris, of which we hear and read so much, and the godlessness of
French statesmanship and French literature, the great body of the
people, even in Paris, still retain their integrity, and a wholesome
fear of God. But because their current literature is heathenish, and
their statesmanship has ignored honesty and the divine origin of man's
rights, those intermediary institutions, which were developed by
Christian charity from the idea that man's rights are sacred because
God-given and dignified by the God-man, have been undermined or
disanimated, and it has come to pass that the only government possible,
where the divine idea is eliminated from politics, is one in the form of
absolutism.
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