What, I ask, has Europe gained by the overthrow of its public law? Strife, anarchy, nihilism in religion as in philosophy. After centuries of dabbling, floundering, and blundering, we are again seeking to devise some principle of unity, some Amphictyonic Council to supplement the illusory balance of power; to set up a Court of Arbitration to replace the one that really did exist in the Middle Ages and functioned as well as could be expected in those days of liquescence.
All in vain. The grand Peace Congress from which the Papacy was excluded was followed, almost immediately, by two most cruel wars which were pre-eminently subjects for arbitration. Men will submit to this court questions about which they do not care enough to fight about them, but these subjects only will they submit to arbitration. Unless the Lord build the house, in vain they labour who build.
There is only one tribunal that can ever arbitrate efficaciously, and this is the one which presided at the Genesis of Christendom.[27]
Socialists and anarchists, without having pondered the passage from Guizot I quoted in beginning this chapter, understand perfectly that our Western or Christian civilization is grounded on the unity of one Holy Catholic Church, and the destruction of the social structure being the object of their ambition, they very logically direct all their efforts to destroying this foundation.
The work of disintegration was begun in the sixteenth century. “Socinius, the most iconoclastic of Protestants, predicted that the seditious doctrines by which Protestants supported their cause would lead to the disintegration of society” (History of Rationalism, II, 239).
This work of disintegration has made rapid progress since the eighteenth century in virtue of the law of accelerated movement. The French Revolution, like the Protestant revolt, was essentially a work of disintegration. The successors of the Masonic Jacobins of 1790 openly proclaim their set purpose of completing the work begun by the grands ancêtres of bloody memory.
“The Revolution,” wrote Renan (in the preface to Questions contemporaines), “has disintegrated everything, broken up all organizations, excepting only the Catholic Church. The clergy alone have remained organized outside the State. As the cities, in the days of the ruin of the Roman Empire, chose bishops for their representatives, so in our provinces the bishops will soon be the only leaders left in a dismantled society.”
The object of the Separation Law was to accomplish the disintegration of the Church, the only organized body, outside the State, which the Revolution failed to disintegrate, because Pius VI rejected, in toto, the civil constitution of the clergy. These noble French priests were drowned, guillotined, proscribed, and imprisoned by tens of thousands, but the Church in France maintained the principle of life strong within her, and on the third day she rose again.
What violence failed to accomplish a century ago, the Third Republic hoped to compass by guile and fraud, labelled liberty and legality.
The true purpose of the Law of Separation was to break up the Church into an ever-increasing number of viviparous Associations cultuelles, independent of all ecclesiastical control.