THE CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XI., No. 61.—APRIL, 1870.
RELIGIOUS LIBERTY.[1]
LAST ARTICLE.
In our third article on the Abbé Martin's exhaustive work on the future of Protestantism and Catholicity, we disposed of the pretension of Protestants that the Reformation created and has sustained civil and political liberty in modern society. We proceed in the present and concluding article to dispose, as far as we can, of the pretension that it has founded and sustained religious liberty, or the freedom of conscience.
No fact is more certain than that the Reformation has the credit with non-Catholics, if not even with some half-instructed Catholics themselves, of having originated religious liberty and vindicated the freedom of the mind. Here as elsewhere the formula of the age, or what claims to be enlightened in it, is, Protestantism and freedom, or Catholicity and slavery; and it is to its prestige of having founded and sustained religious liberty that Protestantism owes its chief ability in our times to carry on its war against the church. Protestantism, like all false religions or systems, having no foundation in truth and no vital energy of its own, lives and prospers only by availing itself of the so-called spirit of the age, or by appealing to the dominant public opinion of the time and the place. In the sixteenth century, the age tended to the revival of imperialism or cæsarism, and Protestantism favored monarchical absolutism, and drew from it its life, its force, and its sustenance.
The spirit or dominant tendency of our age, dating from the middle of the last century, has been and is the revival of the pagan republic, or, as we call it, democratic cæsarism, which asserts for the people as the state the supremacy which under imperialism is asserted for the emperor. Protestantism lives and sustains itself now only by appealing to and representing this tendency, as we may see in the contemporary objections to the church, that she is "behind the age," "does not conform to the age," "is hostile to the spirit of the age," "opposed to the spirit of the nineteenth century."
Every age, nation, or community understands by liberty, freedom to follow unrestrained its own dominant tendency; we might say, its own dominant passion. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, liberty meant the freedom of temporal sovereigns to govern according to their own good pleasure, unrestrained by the church, on the one hand, and estates, diets, or parliaments, on the other. Liberty means now the freedom of the people, unrestrained either by the rights of God or the rights of princes, to govern as they or the demagogues, their masters, judge proper. Hence, liberty, as the world understands it, varies in its meaning from age to age, and from nation to nation, and, indeed, from individual to individual. Whatever favors or is in accordance with the dominant tendency or passion of an age, nation, community, or individual, favors or is in accordance with liberty; and whatever opposes or impedes it is opposed to liberty—is civil, political, or spiritual despotism. Protestantism never resists, but always follows, and encourages and echoes the dominant tendency of the age or nation. The church, having a life and force derived from a source independent of the age or nation, seeks not support in that dominant passion or tendency, does not yield or conform to it, but labors unceasingly and with all her energy to conform it to herself. Hence, in the estimation of the world, Protestantism is always on the side of liberty, and the church on the side of despotism and slavery.
The attempt to deny this, and to prove that the church favors liberty in this sense, is perfectly idle; and to seek to modify her position and action, so as to force her to accept and conform to the dominant or popular tendency or passion of the age or nation, is to mistake her essential character and office, and to forget that her precise mission is to govern all men and nations, kings and peoples, sovereigns and subjects, and to conform them to the invariable and inflexible law of God, which she is appointed by God himself to declare and apply, and therefore to resist with all her might every passion or tendency of every age, nation, community, or individual, whenever and wherever it deviates from that law of which she is the guardian and judge. The church is instituted, as every Catholic who understands his religion believes, to guard and defend the rights of God on earth against any and every enemy, at all times and in all places. She therefore does not and cannot accept, or in any degree favor, liberty in the Protestant sense of liberty, and if liberty in that sense be the true sense, the Protestant pretension cannot be successfully denied.
But we have already seen that liberty in the Protestant sense is no liberty at all, or a liberty that in the civil and political order is identified with cæsarism—the absolutism of the prince in a monarchy, the absolutism of the people or of the ruling majority for the time in a democracy. This last might be inferred from the ostracism practised in democratic Athens, and is asserted and defended, or rather taken for granted, by almost the entire secular press in democratic America. The most conservative politicians among us recognize the justice of no restrictions on the will of the people but such as are imposed by written constitutions, and which a majority or three fourths of the voters may alter at will and as they will. It is the boast of our popular orators and writers that there are with us no restrictions on the absolute will of the people but such as the people voluntarily impose on themselves, which, as self-imposed, are simply no restrictions at all. It is evident, then, if liberty means any thing, if there is any difference between liberty and despotism, freedom and slavery, the Protestant understanding of liberty is not the true one.