The doom of slavery was sealed when Peter began his memorable discourse, saying “Men and brethren” to circumcised and uncircumcised alike. On that day the Church began her mission of liberation by subjugation to the Christian law.
But so ancient and deeply-rooted an institution as slavery could not wisely nor safely be felled suddenly. It was not till 1167 that Pope Alexander III published the charter of Christian liberty. “This law alone,” writes Voltaire (Essai sur les mœurs, chap. LXXXIII), “should render his memory precious to all people, as his efforts on behalf of liberty for Italy should endear him to Italians.”
Wherever Christianity permeates, even in an emaciated form, slavery must disappear, and wherever Christianity has not penetrated slavery is and always will be a standing institution, with its concomitant degradation of women.
Another proposition, a corollary of the first, is equally true. If, and when, and where Christianity disappears, liberty, which is bound up with and inseparable from the Christian law, will also diminish and disappear, tantum quantum.
The world, in my opinion, has never adequately laid to heart the terrible lessons taught by the French Revolution. They are not laid bare in their naked hideousness. The glamour of those much-violated principles of 1789, and the catchwords of liberty, equality, and fraternity are used to cover up the dire significance of that event. In a moment of wild delirium, the most illustrious of nations allowed its government to pass into the hands of a band of atheists prepared by Voltaire and his ilk. Christianity was solemnly abjured in the name of the whole nation, and the worship of Reason inaugurated with all the paraphernalia of ritual and the pomp of worship. What was the immediate result? In the twinkling of an eye all liberty vanished. Terror reigned supreme. The most sacred rights of the individual were proscribed. Men could no longer call their lives their own under the law of Suspects. From my window at Lyons, I could see the monument to the victims of 1793. This city had at first submitted to the Revolutionary government, but the Lyonnais revolted when they found themselves deprived of civil and municipal liberties they had enjoyed under the most despotic kings. Lyons was besieged by those singular champions of liberty who, according to Macaulay, “crowded into a few months more crimes than had been committed by the French kings in as many centuries.”
Lyons succumbed after a gallant resistance of ten months. This quarter, where stands the monument to the victims, was then swampy ground, and it was literally soaked that year, not with the overflow of the Rhône, but with human gore. On the beautiful Place Bellecour two guillotines functioned day and night, but they were inadequate to the bloody task, and the citizens were mown down in batches on the Place des Jacobins. The successors of these Freemason Jacobins control the destinies of France to-day, by means of a Socialist parliamentary majority, obtained by the means I described in a previous article. They lost no time in ostracising tens of thousands of France’s noblest sons and daughters, who may not live as they see fit, nor exercise a profession which is open to all by law. The law Falloux of 1852 confers on all citizens duly qualified the right to teach or open schools, and it is still unrepealed. Millions of parents are deprived of the right to educate their children as they see fit in their native land. Exile is the price of liberty. This is the beginning of that diminution of liberty which must always accompany the elimination of the Christian principle on which our civilization reposes.
With stupendous cynicism Waldeck Rousseau calls the Associations Bill a “law of liberty and of appeasement.” One or two passages will exemplify the character of this infamous Act.
ART. I
All associations can be formed freely and without authorization.
ART. XIII